Down at the station, Detective Michael Wall led Frank Howard down a long hallway, toward an interrogation room.
Getting Frank down to the station had been little more than a formality. The fact that he was the victim’s husband made him an automatic suspect. But the police knew Frank had been in Tahoe on the night of the shooting. And back in Carrollton, where the Howards had lived for years and years, everyone knew Frank to be an upstanding, churchgoing family man.
The most that the detective hoped for now was that Frank would be able to fill in some background, remember a detail or two that would generate some sort of lead.
“Can you update me on your wife’s condition?” the detective asked. “Tell me what the doctors said?”
“Yes,” Frank said. “Actually it sounds very bad when you say it: ‘Somebody was shot in the head.’ But actually, it’s very, very good.”
Nancy’s injuries could have been so much worse, Frank told the detective.
“There’s no brain damage. None of that. She’ll lose her eye, but from there it will be cosmetic stuff.”
“Is there anything you know of—did she have problems with anybody?”
“No, no,” Frank insisted. “Absolutely not. But Nancy can be real giving and…and real open. She’ll open our door to a stranger, invite him inside. Pick a hitchhiker up and go out of her way to drop him at his location. A month ago, someone came to our door. They just needed money to get a hotel room ’cause their car had broken down—”
“They came to your house?”
“To the house, yeah. They came to the front door. And Nancy told them—she’s got a good heart—she said that she’d help them find a hotel room.”
“You think she might have opened the door for someone on the night of the shooting?”
“I don’t know,” Frank said. “I wish to God that I did know.”
“And our understanding is you were not there on the night of the shooting.”
“No, sir, I was not. I travel a lot for work. I did text with Nancy and emailed with her that day. I know that she had a ladies’ lunch at our church.”
“You texted with her right before the shooting?”
“Yes, sir. That’s my understanding.”
“And just to confirm that, would you mind if we ran an analysis on your cell phone?”
“Not at all. And if there’s anything else I can do…if it gets to the point where I can offer a reward, anything at all, I’ll be happy to do it.”
Frank looked down at his hands. He didn’t want to seem overeager. But this seemed just short of the line, and he was relieved when he looked back up and saw the detective smiling at him.
“Thank you,” Detective Wall said as he took Frank’s iPhone and placed it in a yellow envelope. “If it gets to the point where we’ve exhausted our leads, that’s another step we could take. Obviously, money can prompt people to give information.”
“Yes, sir,” Frank said.
“In my experience,” Wall added as he shook Frank’s hand, “money makes people do all sorts of things.”