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.”
“What does that mean, Billie?”
“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.