Murder, Interrupted (James Patterson's Murder is Forever) by James Patterson

Author:James Patterson [Patterson, James]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Published: 2018-01-01T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 42

Stacey, Raley, Wall, and Nancy

Frank knew that Billie Earl Johnson had done well on the stand. The blackmail angle had made sense, when Frank’s lawyers had presented it to him. But Billie Earl had made it sound ridiculous. Then Billie’s girlfriend had taken the stand and backed the things Billie had said right down to the smallest details. The dates she gave matched the ones Billie had given. Her descriptions of meetings with Mr. John synched exactly with the ones her boyfriend had provided.

Stacey admitted it—she knew full well that “Mr. John” was paying Billie to do away with his wife, Nancy Howard. She admitted that she’d enjoyed all the money and all the things she’d bought with it. “It beat working, I’ll tell you that much,” she said. But backing Billie up again, she said that they’d never planned to go through with the murder.

“This man, Mr. John, never sat right with me,” Stacey said. “There’s something twisted about him. I told Billie that no good would come out of getting involved in this business. But Billie was never actually going to kill anyone. And Mr. John was just giving us money. We weren’t stealing. So where was the crime?”

When Frank Howard’s defense lawyer asked Stacey about the supposed blackmail plot, she said the same thing Billie had said: “That’s ridiculous. That doesn’t even make sense!”

Frank’s old boss, Richard Raley, took the stand too. Like Billie Earl Johnson, Raley was dressed in an orange jumpsuit. He was in jail on prescription-drug-related charges. But what he told the jury about was the millions of dollars that Frank had stolen from him. The district attorney called an expert witness—a Secret Service agent—to back Raley up, and the agent testified about files and money transfers and all of the spreadsheets on Frank Howard’s laptop.

Then Detective Michael Wall took the stand and led the jury through his whole investigation, detail by painstaking detail.

The officer who’d arrived at Nancy’s door on the night of the shooting also testified, describing the way she’d looked as he sprinted up the walkway toward her door—and the way she had fallen into his arms once he’d gotten there.

At one point, the beaded, bloodied blouse that Nancy had worn on the night of the shooting was shown to the jury. Frank couldn’t help wincing as the prosecutor held it up. The district attorney played a recording of Nancy’s frantic 911 call. He brought out the 911 operator herself to testify. Finally, he showed the jury photographs of the crime scene, with Nancy’s blood visible in all the pictures.

He was like a dog that had gotten ahold of a really good bone. And Nancy Howard’s own testimony was all the more devastating for the cool, even tone she delivered it in.

She began by describing the night of the shooting—her struggle with her assailant, the cold look in his eyes as she prayed and begged Jesus to save her.

Then Nancy described the aftermath.

“God spoke to me and said, ‘Get up, get up,’” she told the jury, “and He gave me the strength to get up.

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