Read Online Don’t Look Behind You by Ann Rule - Free Book Online

liquor store and get a gallon jug of rum. He came back with just a small one, and she told him, ‘No, I want a
gallon
jug’—so he comes back with a gallon of vodka. She was handing it to me, and he got upset,” Ron said. “So she took it back and whispered to me that once he left, I could have it.”
    Asked if Renee had seemed happy or annoyed when Joe showed up at her house, Ron Isaak remembered that she had seemed irritated with him despite his generosity with all the free prime steaks. “She mostly ignored Joe that night,” Ron said.
    Ben Benson realized that the night of the barbecue could well have been the last night that Joe Tarricone was alive: September 23, 1978. Or had the barbecue taken place on some other night—some night that was only close to Ron Isaak’s birthday?
    According to both of her cousins, Joe had done everything he could to please Renee at the birthday barbecue. He’d cooked all the steaks. There were so many that people at the party had even tossed the expensive cuts to the dogs.
    But nothing Joe did had any positive effect on Renee.
    Renee had bragged to her cousins that Joe had already given her a black Mercedes convertible, and she kept it—although she stored it at her aunt Lillian’s house until it was repossessed by an Alaskan finance company a few years after Joe disappeared.
    Renee couldn’t seem to say anything nice about Joe Tarricone. She had even hinted to several of her relatives that she believed Joe was involved in something crooked—possibly with the Mafia. She said it was likely that Joe’s meat company was only a front for some illegal operation, and that could be dangerous.
    Neither Ron nor Dean had seen Joe since the night of the birthday barbecue. They had asked Renee about him.
    “She said that he disappeared and that maybe he even got thrown in the ocean or something by the mob,” Dean Isaak said. “But she really didn’t know.”
    Their aunt—Geri Hesse—had seemed to be very worried about Joe when she didn’t hear from him after thenight of the party. She told relatives that she took it upon herself to check out Tarricone’s business office when she went up to Alaska to stay for a while with her oldest child—her son, Nick.
    “She said she found the place a mess—as if someone had trashed it. She thought there had possibly been a fight there.”
    Ben Benson was learning more about Renee Curtiss. He knew now that she had a sister, Cassie, and a brother, Nick, as well as aunts, uncles, and more cousins. The two cousins Ben talked to had spoken of her as a generous woman who went out of her way to help them when they were down on their luck.
    On the other hand, the Tarricone family believed that she was a devil woman who would stop at nothing to get what she wanted—even murder.
    Benson looked for more of Renee’s relatives. Although Dean and Ron Isaak had spoken positively about Renee, their sister, Victoria, was more judgmental.
    When Benson spoke to Victoria McMillan, she was aware that some human remains had been found on the property where her aunt Geri and cousin Renee had once lived. Victoria didn’t know who the bones might belong to.
    Victoria said she had thought Renee Curtiss was “shady” during a time when she was younger. “In fact,” she said, “I thought she worked as a prostitute. Geri may have been, too, or she might have just introduced Renee to ‘dates.’
    “They always spent more than they earned; Renee wasalways flying here and flying there with men, and she got really neat presents from them,” Victoria said. “One time, Renee told me, ‘If you’re gonna give it up, you might as well get paid for it.’”
    Benson knew that of the many places Renee listed on her job résumé, one suggested that she
might
be selling sex. She had been employed by Elite Models in Seattle.
    Her cousin confirmed that Renee Curtiss had not one but two children, neither of whom she had raised herself. “Aunt Geri raised Diana, and