“A hit man, Detective?”
“That’s what it looks like to me. I don’t have a confirmed suspect, or motive. I don’t have concrete evidence that would tie the victim’s husband in with the case. What I do have is footage that tells me the victim was tailed. I have her driver’s license—a license that the shooter checked and discarded, after performing the hit. I have a screenshot of a man who basically matches the victim’s description, right in the church that he followed her from.”
“Good enough to run through the database?”
“No, not nearly. But with one more lead, we could crack this case open.”
By the time Michael Wall had had his fifth and final cup of coffee for the day, the news had spread through the station: A shooter—a hit man—working right under their noses in Carrollton. The cops could hardly believe it. Nothing like this had ever happened in Carrollton before. But Wall had a good reputation. He was thorough and levelheaded. And on his way out of the office that evening, he finally caught a break.
“Detective?”
Wall turned around and saw Bethany Wright, a Carrollton PD officer who worked night patrol and raised two teenage boys by herself during the day.
“Officer, what can I do for you?”
“Detective, I heard about your break in the Howard case. It was a targeted hit?”
“That’s what it looks like, Bethany. They tossed the victim’s purse but took the driver’s license out of it first.”
“Checking to make sure they’d shot the right woman?”
“Can’t see another reason for someone to do that,” the detective says.
“Maybe I should have mentioned this sooner,” says the officer. “But a few weeks, maybe a few months ago, I booked a kid from East Texas. A meth head. I’ll go find the paperwork for you. But what I remember about him is this: He wouldn’t stop talking. And I’ll check my notes, but the thing that stuck in my mind was he told me he’d come to town to kill somebody.”
“You don’t say,” says the detective. “Well, you’ve got my full attention.”
“Now, most of what he said made no sense at all. He was just rambling and rambling. His brains were fried. A meth head, like I said. But he was just a kid, not much older than my own sons. I didn’t make much of it at the time.”
“And you checked this kid’s record?”
“I did. It was clean. So I let him sleep it off in the cell and we let him go the next morning. But, Detective, there’s one more thing I remember.”
“I’m listening, Bethany.”
“He actually used the word ‘hit man.’”
“Okay. We will certainly be looking into that. And, Bethany?”
“Yes, sir?”
“In the future, please feel free to come to me with anything like this. Anything at all.”
“Of course, sir. I’m sorry I didn’t bring it up earlier.”
“Well, you’re probably right and it’s probably nothing, so there’s nothing for you to feel sorry about. But in the meantime, why don’t you go and get all your paperwork on the kid. I’ll stick around and we’ll look over that report together.”
Chapter 36
Billie
Bethany Wright’s memories of the methed-out kid matched up neatly with what she wrote down on the night of Dustin’s arrest. It was right there, in the report: “I came to Carrollton to do a hit,” Dustin had told the officer. “That’s what I do. I’m a hit man.”
But Dustin’s record, up to that night, had been clean. If he was a hit man, he must have been the most careful hit man in Texas. And nothing else in the report indicated that Dustin was in the least bit careful. Detective Wall told the officer he would have done the same thing: arrested the kid, hoped that it put the fear of God into him, and let him go.
All the same, it was quite the coincidence. The detective still thought it was certainly worth looking into.
But the next day, when he followed up with Nancy Howard, Detective Wall hit a snag. Holding Dustin’s mug shot up to the light in her kitchen, the detective couldn’t help but notice that Nancy trembled slightly as she said she didn’t recognize him as the shooter.
“That’s too bad,” the detective told her. “We could have cracked this case right on the spot.”
“I’m sorry,” Nancy said, and for the second time in as many days, Detective Wall said, “Nothing to be sorry about.”
He meant it too. For the detective, Nancy’s inability to ID the suspect wasn’t entirely conclusive. After all, the surveillance tape from First Baptist showed two men in the silver car that followed Nancy in and out of the church parking lot. Detective Wall made a few marks in his notepad. Back at the station, he put a call in to the police department in Dustin’s town, a hundred miles away from Carrollton.
But before the cops there could get back to him, Wall got an intriguing phone call.
An investigator in Denton, Texas, called to say that an inmate at the Denton jail claimed to have information about Nancy Howard’s shooting.
The inmate turned out to be Billie Earl Johnson—a petty criminal who was very familiar with the inner workings of Texas’s criminal justice system.
“I’ll level with you,” Johnson said when Detective Wall drove up to Denton to meet him. “I’ve got a reputation of being a badass. I mean, everybody’s claiming me to be tough and bad. I ain’t claiming to be tough and bad. I’m mean. I’m mean. What that means is, if you jump on me, I’m going to hurt you.”
Sitting there in his prison jumpsuit, covered in tattoos, Billie looked every bit like the hard case he’d become.
“I’m forty-nine years old,” he said. “I done been in the pen a total of fifteen years. I got grandkids that I want to spend the rest of my life with. I want to be free. And I want out this weekend.”
In exchange for his freedom, he said, Billie was ready to give up the hit team. The ball’s in Wall’s court, Billie told the detective. And the detective had to admit, Billie knew things about the shooting that only someone with some sort of involvement would know: the make and model of Nancy’s Buick. Her address and the basic layout of her house in Carrollton.
“If y’all want this murder solved,” Billie said, “y’all need to work with me. ’Cause I ain’t playing.”
Detective Wall knew that Billie could not have been the shooter. The timeline put him in jail on the night of the attack on Nancy Howard. So whatever it was that Billie had to share had better be good.
“You’ve got to give me some more,” Wall told him. “What I need to know from you now is not just the who and the how but the why. Why would someone want to shoot this woman, Nancy Howard?”
Billie leaned back in the interrogation room’s office chair. He’s got his arms splayed out, arrogantly, across the armrests. With his reading glasses pushed up high on his forehead, he looks a bit like a college professor who’s gone to seed. And he’s still acting as if he’s holding the high card—the ace in the hole.
“I’ll level with you, Billie,” the detective said. “I don’t think this woman deserves what happened—”
“No, she sure didn’t—” Billie interrupted.
“—and she deserves a little bit of justice.”
“Yep, and she’ll get it. But I want my back scratched too.”
“Then tell us why this thing happened.”
“I was laying on the couch and the phone rang,” Billie began. At first, it sounded like a tangent—a story about a man named John who first contacted Billie around 2009. But before long, the story started to come into focus.
“How he got my information, I don’t know,” Billie said. “He said, ‘You don’t know me.’ Told me his name was John. Said, ‘I don’t know you, but I caught word that you might be the one to do a job for me.’ He wanted it done as an accident so it wouldn’t come on him. Like a carjacking, purse-snatching accident. Now, I’m not gonna go kill nobody. But if this man John wants to throw his money away, you’re damn sure I’m going to take it.”
“I strung him along and strung him along. For years. This man John drove a Lexus. He carried tens of thousands of dollars in cash. He had money to burn.”
“How many conversations did you have with this John regarding this getting done?”
“Numerous.”
“More than ten?”
“Yeah.”
“More than twenty?”
“Fifty. Sixty.”
Detective Wall wrote it all down in his notebook. Then, flipping back a few pages, he looked over the notes that he’d made after reading Dustin’s arrest report, back at the station.
“Mr. John,” Dustin had told Officer Bethany Wright. She’d written it down in the arrest report that she’d shown the detective.
“Mr. John” was the name of the man Dustin claimed to have come to Carrollton to meet.
“Billie,” said the detective. “I want to ask you about Dustin—”
“Shit,” Billie interrupted him. “That’s my son-in-law,” he said, confusing the word for “stepson.”
“You’re married, Billie?”
“No, but his mother and I are together.”
“And do you think Dustin might have had something to do with this shooting?”
“Dustin? He’s so stupid he don’t know how to put antifreeze in a truck. He don’t know nothin’ about nothin’.”
Billie knew he was skirting the edge: He’d told the cops he knew who the shooter was. And he knew that Dustin was there that night. Still he thought he could walk the fine line, give the cops just enough information without implicating his girlfriend’s son.
“And if we were to have a few words with him?” asked the detective.
“Be my guest,” said Billie. Then his face hardened. “But you’ll be barking up the wrong tree. Y’all want it, I’m the one who’s got it. I’ll give it to you in a golden basket. But I’m not giving up nothing until I’ve got something solid on my end. I’ll die with it.”
Sitting there, grinning his arrogant grin, Billie did not understand that he’d given the police so much already: that by admitting he knew who the shooter was he’d all but implicated himself in the shooting.
For the moment, Detective Wall was not about to let on.
Chapter 37
Dustin
Down at the Smith County Sherriff’s Office, two hours outside of Carrollton, Dustin did very little to dispel Billie Johnson’s sorry description of him.
He really did seem too dumb to change the antifreeze in a truck.
There’s still a part of Michael Wall that can’t believe Frank would hire someone so stupid to do Nancy in. But, in the course of the week, a few things had come into focus for the detective: Billie’s description of “Mr. John” matched Frank Howard perfectly. Then there’s Frank’s full name, which turned out to be John Franklin Howard. And now there’s Dustin.
Wall had spent a full day talking to Dustin, waiting for him to calm down, winning his trust, and waiting for the right moment to show him a photograph of Frank Howard.
When that moment came, Dustin bolted out of his chair.
“Yeah!” he said. “That’s Mr. John!”
“You’re a good kid,” the detective told Dustin. “You’ve got yourself messed up in a little thing, but you’re a good kid.”
But when Dustin looked back up at Wall, his eyes were wild. It’d been a week since the shooting, and several days now since he’d had any real sleep. First, there’d been the mountain of meth that he’d done. Then the meth had run out—which had been even worse. He’d gotten nauseous and sweaty, dry-mouthed, paranoid. And that was before he’d opened his door to the Carrollton detective waiting outside.
Now, at the station, Dustin couldn’t stop shaking. He’d been talking to the cops for hours now. Talking in circles and crying, lost in his own lies. All week, he’d been afraid that his mom’s boyfriend, Billie, would find out that he and Michael had failed at the job—find out that, although she’d been shot in the head, Nancy Howard was alive and out of the hospital. If Billie found out, there’d be hell to pay. And no matter how much meth he smoked, Dustin knew that it was a matter of when and not if.
He’d been so scared, he hadn’t even thought of the cops. But Detective Wall was even-tempered, encouraging. Dealing with him, in the moment, had to have been better than dealing with Billie Earl Johnson down the line.
Even if it wasn’t, Dustin did not see that he had any choice. And so he talked, and talked, and kept on talking. He talked about all the money that he, and Billie, and other folks in Ben Wheeler had burned through—astronomical sums—but when the detective pressed him, Dustin said, no, it’s all true. Tens of thousands. Hundreds of thousands, all the way into the millions.
“One time, it must have been eight thousand dollars blew off the hood of my car,” Dustin said.
“Did you go back to get it?”
“Nah. We all knew there was more where it came from.”
Dustin talked about how stupid they all thought Mr. John was to keep paying and about how sorry he felt now for Nancy Howard.
“She didn’t do nothing wrong,” Dustin told the detective. “She’s a Christian woman, dude.”
“Who shared with you that she’s a Christian woman?”
“John did.”
Then Dustin started talking about all of John’s plans to murder the woman: in her hotel room, during some convention. In a restaurant parking lot. At home, while scrapbooking with her friends. It would be all right to kill her friends, John had told him, as long as he got Nancy for sure. It would be all right to burn the house down, too, as long as Nancy was inside it.
“Sometimes he’d say ‘use a baseball bat.’ Sometimes he’d say ‘use a gun.’ The time he told me to ‘just burn her house down,’ Mr. John laughed.”
There’s a part of the detective that didn’t want to believe it. He didn’t want to believe that a man like Frank Howard could be Mr. John. That a man—a preacher’s kid, for God’s sake—could do such evil, and do it to those he was closest to. He did not want to believe that such a man could have lived, worked, and worshipped right there in Carrollton, a town full of god-fearing, law-abiding, decent, and kindhearted people.
But, with the facts right there in front of him, the detective did believe it. He knew that John Franklin Howard would rot in hell for what he did to his wife, Nancy. And before he did, the detective hoped he’d feel the full weight of the judicial system in Texas—feel it hard, and for a long time, like the wrath of the God that Frank Howard betrayed when he first put his mind to violating the commandments against murder and adultery.
Chapter 38
Nancy
The bandage over Nancy’s left eye was smaller now. She was steadier on her feet, getting around the house and even out in the yard, where she sat in a wooden lawn chair, leafing through magazines while Frank was away at the office.
It had been a few days now since Frank had gone back to work full-time. Nancy was learning what it’s like to be lonely again, except she was lonelier now for having had Frank at home since the shooting, taking care of her around the clock. He’d spoiled her, Nancy thought, with all of this care and attentiveness. Of course, some of it had to come down to the guilt he felt over falling for some other woman. But whoever that woman might be, it’s Nancy that Frank had finally chosen. He’d assured her, many times over, swearing to God that he’d put an end to the affair.
Still, Nancy thought, if she could spend just five minutes inside of Frank’s head. What had drawn her to him in the first place was how open he was. She used to read him like an open book—every hope and dream that he’d ever had was written right there on his face. And over the years, most of those hopes and those dreams had come true. But somewhere along the way, the book of Frank had snapped shut.
Nancy did not understand it at all.
Sighing, she got up from the lawn chair, shuffled back into the house, and lay down on the living room sofa. Th
e garage and downstairs hallway smelled like fresh paint—it’d taken two coats to cover the bloodstains. Nancy was too attached to this house, where she raised her children, to ask Frank to move. But she didn’t go downstairs anymore. Frank did their laundry now, dropped her off at the front door after outings before pulling into the garage. But attentive as he had been, Frank couldn’t do everything. He was helpless in the kitchen, for instance. So tonight, on his way home, he’d stop by Cane Rosso, the brick-oven pizza place, to pick up some Bolognese and a couple of marinara pies. Ashley, their daughter, was coming to dinner, and pizza had always been her favorite food.
Smiling at the thought of it, Nancy drifted off.
* * *
When she woke up, Nancy didn’t know what time it was. She didn’t remember falling asleep on the sofa. She didn’t remember her dreams. But it must have been evening because Frank was home, and Ashley too. Nancy heard their voices, coming from the kitchen, and smelled the good Italian food.
“Honey?” she calleds out.
No answer. She hears Frank’s laugh, and Ashley’s. They always did have their own, private language. So much has changed for them these past few weeks, Nancy thinks. But the most important things stayed the same.
“Honey?” she called again, louder this time.
“I’ll be right there,” Frank answered, but Nancy didn’t hear him. Someone was knocking at their front door.
“Frank? Frank? I hear someone knocking.”
“I’ll get it,” Frank hollered back.
Outside, Detective Michael Wall and two Carrollton police officers were waiting with an arrest warrant.
* * *
“Frank, what is this?”
Nancy was standing in the vestibule, looking into her husband’s eyes as one of the officers put him in handcuffs.
“You have the right to remain silent,” the other officer said.
Murder Is Forever, Volume 1 Page 8
