Don't Look Behind You and Other True Cases Read Online Free PDF

she didn’t have a car—so she went to the closest police station, even though she believed that her dad had gone missing in Puyallup.
    If it was Joe who was missing, who then was the man known as Isaak? Benson checked missing persons complaints in Pierce County and Tacoma for 1979. He found nothing that seemed to fit. Next, he asked law enforcement agencies in counties north and south of Pierce County.
    With Jan Rhodes’s help, Benson learned that Gypsy and Gina’s missing father was Joseph Anthony Tarricone, who would have been fifty-three in 1978. There was only a blurred photo of him available in the old file, but his daughter had given his description: six feet one inch, two hundred–plus pounds, brown eyes and graying black hair, partially balding.
    In 1979, Gypsy and Gina had said that their mother—Joseph’s ex-wife Rose—lived in Albuquerque, New Mexico, as did most of their five siblings. On that day in January, twenty-eight years before, Joseph Tarricone had been missing for about four months. He had failed to contact his elderly parents, his ex-wife, or any of his children.
    Benson’s eyes widened as he read further; apparently the last time anyone saw Tarricone, he had been visiting a girlfriend who lived near Puyallup, Washington.
    The girlfriend’s name was Renee, and her phone number was on the report, although it was hardly likely she still had the same number after so long. Chances were that she had married in the years between 1978 and 2007 and probably had another last name now.
    Fortunately, Des Moines detective Jerry Burger had added many details to the missing report. Gina Tarriconehad told him that her father owned a business in Anchorage. She said she and Gypsy had called his girlfriend several times over the years, but Renee had always said she was as mystified as anyone about where Joe might have gone. She did say, however, that she and her mother—Geraldine Hesse—had moved to a town north of Anchorage in the seventies.
    That answered one important question. Geri Hesse had been the renter of the Carlsons’ house. Maybe it was her older daughter—Renee—who had dated Joe. By Benson’s figuring, that young woman would probably be in her fifties now, if she was still alive. But three decades was a long time. The Pierce County detective checked death records and found that Geri Hesse, the mother, had died in 2000.
    No one seemed to know where her daughters were in the summer of 2007.

PART TWO
JOE TARRICONE
     

Chapter Four
     
    Joseph Anthony Tarricone had come a long distance from the place he was born to meet his killer. His parents lived in New York—in Brooklyn—and they always would. But not Joe; he had itchy feet and the personality of a natural-born entrepreneur.
    Joe was the Tarricones’ oldest child and only son, and his Italian parents were thrilled with their dark handsome baby son when he was born in 1925. Two sisters joined the Tarricone family in the following years, but Joey was always the star, the innovator, whose expansive personality drew people to him all his life.
    Most Italian sons adore their mothers, and Joe was no exception. Wherever he might travel, he would always keep in touch with her. Her name was Clara, and Joe never failed to remember her with gifts on her birthday and on Mother’s Day. He called home to New York frequently. Among the things that Joe and his wife, Rose, argued about were the huge phone bills that came in. He explained that he wasn’t going to put a time limit on his conversations with his folks.
    As Joe and his sisters were growing up, the Tarricone household was full of music, noise, hilarity, and the redolent smell of ravioli, spaghetti, pasta fagioli, sausages and peppers, and pizza; Joe learned to cook from Clara, and it was to become one of his favorite pastimes as an adult.
    All the Tarricones were devout Catholics. Going to mass wasn’t a choice; it was taken for granted that they would attend on Sundays and holy days. Faith