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.