But Not For Lust

by BJ Bourg

  “He dictated the pace.” Susan was barely out of breath. She indicated the injured man. “He’s alive, ain’t he? He got off lucky.”

  She was right. Had there been a dozen or more feet between us, we would’ve had time to draw our weapons and shoot him repeatedly. Rather than lying here writhing in pain, he would be bleeding to death on the floor instead.

  Dillon groaned as I guided his left arm back to meet his right. His shoulders were large and stiff, so I had to force his wrists together before ratcheting on my handcuffs.

  “Watch it!” he grumbled. “You’re gonna break my other arm!”

  “Shut up,” was all I said. I straightened and stared down at him. While I firmly believed he would deserve to die for what he’d done to Ty if found guilty, I was glad things had turned out this way. I had questions and I needed answers. Most importantly, I needed to know about his animus toward Ty. What on earth was it that had driven him to do what he had done to the poor man?

  As Susan headed for my Tahoe to retrieve an evidence box, I pulled out my cell phone and called for an ambulance. After giving them my location and describing Dillon’s injuries, I helped him to a seated position on the floor. Susan returned right at that moment and, after pulling on a latex glove, recovered the knife from the floor where Dillon had dropped it. She inspected it carefully and then waved me over.

  “Look in the crack between the tang and the handle,” she said, pointing. “That’s dried blood.”

  I nodded and grabbed one of the folding chairs. I placed the chair directly in front of Dillon and took a seat. I leaned forward to stare into his eyes. He had lost his sunglasses at some point during the fracas, but there was a pale outline where they used to be, thanks to his many hours of working in the sun while wearing them.

  “You know why we’re here, don’t you?”

  Dillon shifted his position to relieve the pressure on his wrists, but froze and winced in pain. He cursed me and Susan, but neither of us reacted. I wasn’t sure what hurt him worse—his dislocated elbow, his broken fingers, or his crushed jewels—but it was plain to see he was in intense pain.

  “I asked you a question,” I said, lifting my boot and nudging his shoulder. “Do you know why we’re here?”

  He glared up at me, but didn’t say a word.

  “We know everything. We know how you kidnapped Ty, mutilated him, and then beat him to death.” I paused and nodded slowly. “We know every detail about what you did to that poor man. A man like you—I’ve got to think you have a reason for everything you do. What reason did you have for murdering Ty Richardson? The man never hurt anybody. He was innocent of any wrongdoing.”

  “That’s bullshit!” Dillon spat the words. “He was a guilty piece of shit!”

  “Guilty of what?” I pressed. “Putting dents in your wife’s car? That’s no reason to torture the man.”

  Dillon appeared genuinely confused. “What?”

  “Did you kill Ty because he dented your wife’s car?” I asked again.

  “I don’t know anything about dents on my wife’s car.” He snarled. “No, what Ty did was much worse than that. The Bible says an eye for an eye, and that pervert got what was coming to him.”

  “Pervert?” I tried to hide my shock at Ty being called a pervert. I’d never heard such an accusation levied against him. “That doesn’t sound like Ty.”

  “Well, it is!”

  “Okay, I’ll bite. What did he do?”

  Dillon opened his mouth to speak, thought better of it, and then scowled. “I ain’t telling you shit.”

  “Suit yourself.” I leaned back in the chair. It creaked under my weight. “You can keep your mouth shut all the way to the needle, but your reasoning doesn’t matter. We don’t have to prove motive—only intent. And when you beat a man about the head and shoulders with a tire thumper and then remove his genitals with the knife that Chief Wolf’s holding—the same one you used in an attempted murder of two police officers—there’s no doubt about your intentions.”

  “What do you mean by a needle?”

  “I mean you’re going to be sentenced to death,” I explained. “Since Louisiana uses lethal injection as a means of execution, then that’s how your life will come to an abrupt end—hopefully sooner rather than later. I’m sure Ty’s uncle will want to live long enough to watch you die for what you did to his family.”

  “I ain’t getting the needle and I ain’t even going to prison.” He sneered. “What I did was justified!”

  “Well, shit, if it was justified, I’ll have to take off those cuffs and let you go,” I said with a start. “So, why don’t I advise you of your rights and you tell us all about it?”

  CHAPTER 55

  The nearest ambulance was at least thirty minutes away, and I knew we would have time to interrogate Dillon while waiting for it to arrive. I certainly didn’t want to wait and question him later. He was willing to talk now and I was going to take full advantage of it.

  After I advised him of his Miranda rights and helped him to a chair, he cleared his throat and wet his lips.

  “Well, I was supposed to work until this weekend, but I got pulled from the rig on Friday to do a land job. They told me I would be returned to the rig on Sunday night, so I decided to sleep at home for the weekend.” He suddenly scowled and glanced from Susan to me. “Wait a minute—this was a set-up, wasn’t it? They called me here to be arrested. They tricked me!”

  “I’m not at liberty to discuss that issue,” I said matter-of-factly. “Get back to your story. You were supposed to work all weekend, and…”

  He cleared his throat. “After I finished the job Friday evening, I drove home. It was late, so I expected to find Betty sound asleep. Only, she wasn’t home. Her car wasn’t there and she wasn’t inside. I wasn’t happy and I got suspicious, so I parked my truck on the next street and sat in the living room waiting for her.”

  He shifted in his chair and winced in obvious pain. “Bitch!” he muttered, shooting a quick glance in Susan’s direction.

  “What did you say?” I asked, leaning closer.

  “I was just saying my hand hurts like a bitch,” he said quickly. “I think Gina Carano here broke all of my fingers.”

  “You’re lucky you got your hand back,” I said with a smirk. “I’m betting you’ll think twice about trying to grab a woman by the throat again.”

  When he didn’t respond, I encouraged him to continue talking. “I need to understand what you think Ty did to deserve such treatment.”

  “I don’t think he did anything—I know it.” He stared at me with pain in his eyes. “Do you know what the worst thing was about that night?”

  “What’s that?”

  “That I doubted my wife.” Tears actually pooled in the large man’s eyes and began leaking down his face. “In my mind, I was accusing her of all kinds of evil. When she came through the door, I flipped the light switch on and was prepared to confront—to accuse—her of doing something bad. That’s when I realized she wasn’t wearing a bra and her shirt was ripped. There was also a welt across her face and her neck was red. I…I asked her what happened and she said she’d been raped by the crazy man who lived on her sister’s street. It was that guy named Ty. He…he hurt my wife.”

  Dillon got choked up and began crying softly. I glanced at Susan and frowned. It suddenly made sense. The man had thought he was avenging his wife. I couldn’t much blame him, because I would’ve probably done the same thing if I thought that had happened to Susan. There was only one problem; the story he’d been told was a lie.

  “Have you ever been arrested before?” I asked after a moment, already knowing the answer to the question.

  He shook his head from side to side, but didn’t look up. “Never.”

  “Have you ever hit your wife?”

  “Hell no!” He looked up, his eyes wide with shock. “I would never!”

  I nodded and stared at him for a long moment, measuring my words carefully. If he had gone to such
extreme measures to defend his wife’s honor, he would not like my next question.

  “Has Betty ever asked you to hit her?” I asked slowly. “During intercourse, that is?”

  His expression turned to one of pure hate. “You wouldn’t ask that question if my hands were free and you were by yourself,” he said in a low growl. “Even with my arm and fingers broken, I’d whip your ass if you asked that question while I was free.”

  “Look, I’m not trying to be disrespectful.” I paused for a moment. “Your wife wasn’t raped, Dillon. She was having an affair.”

  “Don’t you dare talk about my wife like that!” His voice was thunderous and he leapt to his feet. “She’s a good woman!”

  I stood and met his gaze, only I was calm and rational while he was blind with rage. As we stared eye-to-eye for a long minute, neither of us saying anything, realization seemed to slowly sink in. He began to realize that I wasn’t lying or bluffing. I don’t think he believed me, but he was starting to wonder if I had some kind of evidence to support my claim.

  “What?” His shoulders slumped. “No way!”

  “When your wife got home Friday night, she was coming back from seeing her lover—Nikia Billiot. I’m sorry to be the one to tell you this, but while you were at work, she was cheating on you with your best friend. It’s been going on for months.”

  “No.” Dillon’s face lost all color. “That’s impossible.”

  “Ty’s only sin was playing in the road that night,” I continued. “Betty almost ran him over, and that’s why she thought to mention his name.”

  “No!” He shook his head. “Betty said it was the crazy man who lives down her sister’s street. She said she almost ran him over and when she stopped to check on him, he attacked her. She said he dragged her to his camper. She said she was fighting back and screaming, but no one came to her rescue. She…she gave me details about what happened—sick details that would anger any man, that would make any man insane. Details that you can’t make up. She was telling the truth.”

  I cocked my head curiously to the side. “Dillon, did you tell Betty what you did to Ty?”

  “I wasn’t gonna, but she saw me covered in blood when I got home that night. When she asked what happened, I told her everything. Well, except the part about Nikia. I didn’t tell her that he was with me.”

  “How’d Betty react when you told her?”

  “Um, I don’t know. It was weird. She looked at me differently after that night. It’s like she fell in love with me all over again—even more than before.” He was thoughtful. “She told me that she never thought someone would kill for her. She said it made her feel more special than she’d ever felt in her life. I defended her honor—I protected her so he could never hurt her again.”

  “I’m sorry, Dillon,” I said with a sigh, “but Ty has never hurt anyone. He didn’t have a lustful disposition. He was a good man who suffered from mental illness—that’s it. He wasn’t dangerous.”

  “No, that’s not true!” Dillon shook his head from side to side, but I could tell he knew I was right. “Stop saying that.”

  “It is true,” I insisted. “Your wife told Nikia she liked it rough. He was the one who ripped her clothes off and had sex with her—”

  “Shut up, damn it! That’s not true!” Dillon’s face was burning with rage, but I was getting the sense it was now directed at Nikia. “Stop calling my wife a liar!”

  Letting out a long sigh, I fished my cell phone from my pocket and accessed the audio file that contained Nikia Billiot’s statement. I advanced the file until I came to the part where Nikia was describing the sex acts he and Betty had participated in on Friday night. I hated to do it, but Dillon needed to know the whole story and he wasn’t listening to me.

  His mouth slowly fell open as his best friend’s voice sounded through the little speaker and described how he had ripped Betty’s shirt and bra off, how he had slapped her around before having sex with her.

  “I gave her what Dillon couldn’t give her,” Nikia was heard saying. “She said he was boring in the bedroom. She wanted to be man-handled, and only a real man can do that.”

  “Is…is that really Nikia?” he asked through clenched teeth. “Is that really my friend? My best friend?”

  “I’m afraid it is.”

  He stammered and tried to string together a few words, but they wouldn’t fall into place.

  “You murdered an innocent man,” I said after a long while of watching him suffer internally. “No one hurt your wife. She lied to cover up her affair with Nikia. She played you, Dillon. She got you to kill an innocent man.”

  It took all of several minutes for him to finally utter a discernible phrase, and it came out more like a question. “I…I killed an innocent man?”

  I frowned and nodded. “You did.”

  “Dear God, I killed an innocent man.” I could almost see the realization sweeping over him. He was recognizing the betrayal that had been perpetrated against him by his wife, and the gravity of his predicament was finally sinking in. “Betty knew he was innocent, but she let me kill him anyway. She…she’s pure evil!”

  CHAPTER 56

  When the ambulance arrived, Baylor was right behind it and Amy was with him. Susan and I had already obtained permission to search Dillon’s truck and had recovered the tire thumper and some blood samples from the bed of the pickup. We had arranged for a tow truck to transport the pickup to the sheriff’s office’s secure motor pool for further processing.

  I waved Baylor over when he arrived.

  “Do you mind waiting for the tow truck to arrive?” I asked. “We need to maintain a secure chain of custody over Dillon’s pickup until it gets to the sheriff’s office.”

  He said he would, and I turned to Amy, who appeared to be walking a lot better than earlier in the day. She wasn’t stomping as confidently as she used to, but it would only be a matter of time.

  Smiling, I said to her, “It’s good to see you back in the saddle.”

  “I already told you—I’m not actually back in the saddle yet,” she grumbled. “I’m up on the wagon seat riding shotgun right now. But, I’ll be back up on that horse in no time. Things are not moving along as fast as I’d like them to move, but they’re at least heading in the right direction.”

  Susan approached us and smiled warmly when she saw Amy. “It’s good to see you out and about.”

  “It’s good to be out and about.” Amy indicated Baylor’s marked police car. “I can’t wait to get behind the wheel again, because his driving scares me.”

  “Ouch!” Baylor grabbed his chest playfully. “That hurt.”

  We all turned when we heard the medics talking. Dillon wasn’t putting up a fuss as the medics loaded him into the back of the ambulance. We had cuffed his hands in the front for transport and I planned on riding in the ambulance until we reached the hospital, where a team of sheriff’s deputies would meet with us and provide security until he was cleared for release. At that point, they would transport him to the detention center and book him into jail on my warrant.

  I turned to Susan when one of the medics waved for me to join them. “See you at the hospital?”

  She nodded and headed for my Tahoe.

  Dillon was quiet on the drive to the hospital. Once, when we were about ten minutes away, he glanced over at me and asked, “What’ll happen to Betty?”

  “She’s going to jail,” I said. “She will not get away with this.”

  He pursed his lips and nodded, as though pleased. He didn’t say another word in the ambulance.

  Once Dillon was in a room at the hospital and under the watchful eyes of several Chateau Parish deputies, I turned to leave.

  “Detective Wolf,” Dillon called from his bed.

  I stopped and faced the man.

  “Please tell Ty Richardson’s family I’m sorry,” he said. “I…I wish I could take it all back.”

  I frowned, nodded, and left the room.

  I met Susan in the
parking lot and we hurried back to the police department, where I typed up an arrest warrant for Betty Watts and a search warrant for her house and property. While I did that, Susan called Mallory Tuttle from the sheriff’s office and asked that she have her crime scene detectives process Dillon’s truck for us and forward all evidence to the crime lab in La Mort.

  Once Susan ended the call, she turned to me. “They’ll take care of the truck for us.”

  I nodded absently, caught up in the narrative I was writing. It was already growing dark outside and I wanted to submit the affidavits to the on-duty judge before it got too late. One thing was certain—I was not going to bed until that conniving woman was behind bars. What she had done was diabolical, and it was disrespectful to every victim of sexual assault. It was worse than what Dillon had done. At least Dillon had acted under the belief that he was avenging his wife.

  Betty had selfishly turned Dillon loose on Ty in an attempt to cover up her affair with his best friend. And after her husband told her what had happened to Ty, she had all but rejoiced in that knowledge. It made me sick to my stomach.

  “Done,” I declared when I’d finished the probable cause narrative for the search warrant. I printed both documents, signed them, scanned them into my computer, and then emailed them to the judge. “Now we wait.”

  It didn’t take long for the judge to return the arrest and search warrants to me. He had signed both, so we were now ready to go. I glanced at the clock on my computer. It was almost seven in the evening.

  “I doubt Betty will talk,” I said to Susan, who sat quietly at the other end of my desk working on a pile of paperwork. The parade was approaching fast, and I knew she was feeling the pressure to finalize the details. “We should have this wrapped up before nine.”

  She nodded idly. “Okay.”

  “Do you want me to ask Melvin to come instead?” I offered. “So you can finish your work.”

  Her head shot up like a snake about to strike. “Hell, no! I wouldn’t miss this for anything.”