03.She.Wanted.It.All.2005 (20 page)

“I’m home,” Justin said.

“Okay,” Kristina answered. “I’m exhausted. I’m going to bed. Talk to you tomorrow.”

“Good night.”

Sometime after two, Tracey was ready. She’d loaded her shotgun and dressed in black. She took the sheet of plastic Celeste had given her, covered the car’s front seat, then put
on the rubber gloves. In her year-old, maroon Pathfinder, she drove toward the Toro Canyon house, trying not to think about why. When she reached the back entrance, the gate was open. She turned off the headlights, pulled forward, put her arm over the seat, and backed up. At first all went well as the car climbed the hill, but then she hit a loose patch of gravel and her wheels spun. She gunned it, praying the noise wouldn’t wake Kristina. Finally, the wheels caught traction and the car pulled backward up the hill. At the top, she stopped, put the car in park and turned off the engine.

Picking her way through the trees in the darkness, she walked along the back of the house to the patio. The house was dark, and the windows looked like blank eyes staring back at her in the night. She paused, thinking about what she was there to do, and she felt ill again. For a moment she flattened her body against the wall and listened. Around her insects buzzed in the woods and a slight breeze ruffled the leaves. The house was quiet.
I can’t do this,
she thought. For minutes she stood statue still, thinking, trying to find another way to save Celeste.

No,
she thought.
This is the only answer. He’ll never let her go. I have to do it. I promised. Stop thinking about it. Just do it.

Holding the shotgun in shaking hands, she felt her way around the house, saw the pool shimmering in the moonlight, then the door. As Celeste had promised, it was unlocked and no alarm sounded.

To save Celeste’s life,
she thought as she let herself in.

Up three steps to her right and she was into the master bedroom wing. Her pulse quickened as she entered the bedroom itself. There, in the bed, she saw Steve’s generous silhouette in the darkened room. She stopped where Celeste had instructed, five feet from the foot of the bed. Without pausing, without allowing herself to think, Tracey raised her
shotgun and took aim. She squeezed the trigger, and a single shot echoed through the house. It reverberated through her so that she felt certain she’d awoken the neighborhood.

God, Kristina must have heard that,
Tracey thought.

“Oomph,” Steve said as the pellets struck his abdomen.

Quickly, Tracey glanced around the floor, looking for the shell, but then Steve moved. His arm wound around his body and held his abdomen, at the site of the gunshot wound. Startling Tracey, he sat up, searching the nightstand on his right, looking for something.

Maybe he has a gun,
she thought.

Frantic, she ran for the patio door, following Celeste’s route for her escape. Again, as promised, the door was unlocked. She slid it open, walked out onto the patio, closed the door and sprinted toward the car. Seconds later she was gone.

T
he voice on the telephone was gruff yet polite,
confused and frightened.

“Nature of the emergency?” a woman dispatcher asked.

“I need an ambulance, hurry,” Steve told the 911 operator just before 3:00
A.M
. on Saturday, October 2, 1999. “Thirty-nine hundred Toro Canyon Road.”

“What’s going on there?”

“My guts blew out of my stomach,” he said.

“Are you alone?”

“My wife is somewhere in the house,” Steve said, groaning.

“Okay. Help is on the way. How did this happen?”

“I just woke up and they blew out of my stomach,” he said, fear clouding his voice. “I can’t move. I’m holding them all.”

“Sir, we’re already on the way.”

“Call my wife. She’s in another part of the house,” he said, repeating the phone number. The woman hung up.

Minutes after the 911 call, Travis County Deputy Alan Howard drove up Westlake Drive, turned right onto Toro
Canyon Road, and swung into the main entrance to the Gardens of Westlake enclave. A house was under construction inside, and the gate had been left open. By the time Howard pulled up in front of the house and parked his squad car with lights flashing on the circle drive, he’d been joined by Stephen Alexander, a captain with the Westlake Fire Department, and Sergeant Greg Truitt, also from the Travis County Sheriff’s Department. Howard pounded on the Beards’ heavy front doors, rang the doorbell, and shouted, trying to raise someone inside. He tried the door. It was locked. The house appeared completely dark. Howard called the dispatcher and asked them to call the number inside, to rouse someone to let them in.

Rather than wait, knowing someone was injured, Howard, Truitt, and Alexander followed the outline of the house, walking to the left. About that time he got a call from Dispatch, saying that no one answered the telephone inside the house. The answering machine had picked up the call. They continued on, by then joined by Deputy Russell Thompson. At the side of the house the officers walked through an opening in a chain-link fence and around a wall until they could turn back to the right, where they entered a small patio. Howard peered in through a window. Who was inside? Why had he called?

Seeing nothing out of the ordinary, Howard led the others past the wall, and found himself staring through French doors into a bedroom. In the semidarkness he saw a lamp shining on a nightstand and the figure of a large man in bed, his right hand holding a telephone receiver. Howard could see blood on the man’s hands.

Grabbing the brass handles on the doors, Howard attempted to twist them. They didn’t move. He pulled. They didn’t budge. Inside, the man shouted something he couldn’t hear. Howard knew from the look of the man’s injuries that
the situation was grave. He took his flashlight and cracked it hard against the glass. It didn’t give. So he reared his hand back and swung again. This time the expensive tempered glass doors shattered into thousands of small pellets, like a car windshield in a traffic accident.

Howard stuck his hand through the opening and looked for a way to unlock the doors, but found nothing. He pulled on the doors again. Again they didn’t budge.

“The door slides!” Steve shouted.

Howard pushed to the sides, and the doors opened. He rushed through, followed by the others, including two officers from the Austin Police Department who’d just arrived on the scene. Even with the noise of shattering glass, the house remained silent.

“What happened to you?” Howard asked.

“I don’t know,” Steve said. “I woke up this way.”

At first glance Steve’s abdomen looked as if someone had shredded it with a razor. Quickly, Alexander put in a call for STAR Flight, requesting an emergency helicopter.

“I heard a loud noise,” Steve went on. “I woke up and my gut was like this, my insides spilling out.”

Grasping for some explanation for the man’s wounds, Howard asked, “Did you have surgery recently? Did your stitches open?”

“No,” Steve said. “No, I didn’t.”

Alexander pulled bandages from his supplies and bound Steve’s wide belly, hoping to keep him pieced together. Another EMS officer arrived, one who worked for the Texas Highway Patrol, and he pitched in dressing Steve’s wounds. Minutes later Austin EMS arrived and pushed them both out of the way, hooking Steve up to an IV and putting him on a portable oxygen tank. Just then word came over Howard’s radio that STAR Flight was on its way. To open the house for those he knew would be arriving, he told Truitt to unlock the
front door. It was in the living room, as he approached the door, that Truitt encountered Celeste and Kristina making their way out from the opposite wing.

The lights woke Kristina. She was sound asleep when something flashed, then again, and again. She opened her eyes and realized they were white and blue, like the lights on a squad car. When her eyes focused, she saw her mother standing at her bedroom door dressed in a T-shirt and boxer shorts.

“What’s going on?” Kristina asked.

“Someone’s at the door,” Celeste said.

Frightened by the prospect of strangers in the middle of the night, Kristina walked to the bedroom door. Before the teenager realized what was happening, her mother pushed her out into the hallway.

“Find out what they want,” Celeste ordered.

Panicking, Kristina ducked into the guest room, where Jennifer normally slept, and dialed 911. When the operator answered, she recited her address, saying someone was at their front door. “It’s the police and EMS,” the dispatcher told her. “Your father called. He has an emergency.”

“Mom, something’s wrong with Dad,” Kristina called out as she ran from the room.

“Who are you?” Celeste demanded of the uniformed officer when she emerged from the children’s wing. “What’s going on?”

“We’ve got a medical emergency,” Truitt said as he came to the door. “Your husband called 911. Has he had recent surgery?”

“No. Is he okay?” Celeste asked.

When Howard told her that Steve appeared badly hurt, Celeste sobbed: “Don’t let my husband die. Don’t let him die.”

Kristina moved forward, trying to comfort her mother.

As soon as Celeste quieted, the teenager rushed to the master bedroom. “Is he all right?” she asked one officer. “Is my father all right?”

“They’re working on him,” he said. “STAR Flight is on its way.”

Kristina went to Steve’s bedside but couldn’t get near because of the crush of police and medics. “Dad, they’re going to take you to the hospital,” she said, looking directly into his eyes, not wanting to see the bloody bed. “We all love you. I love you.”

Steve forced a fleeting smile then nodded. “Is your mother all right?” he asked.

“Yes, she’s fine,” she said, then urged, “Don’t worry. Just get better.”

Steve smiled weakly. With that Kristina left to check on Celeste in the living room. By the time she arrived, her mother was outside on the front steps, smoking a cigarette. She’d just said something that Truitt found surprising for a woman whose husband was critically injured: “This is perfect timing. We’re supposed to leave for Europe tomorrow.”

When she found her mother, Kristina noticed that Celeste had stopped crying. She stayed only moments, then returned to the bedroom to check on Steve.

In the bedroom, Deputy Thompson saw something yellow and round peeking out from under one of the medics’ bags. While the others worked on Steve, he bent over and picked it up. It was a spent shotgun shell, .20 gauge.

“I’ve got a shotgun shell,” he said. “He’s been shot.”

Another officer pointed toward the headboard and wall. Blood splatter and small bits of tissue fanned out in a pale, pinkish spray.

“This is a crime scene,” Thompson announced. “From this point on.”

At that moment Kristina was on her way out the door, after looking in on Steve a third time. She spun back into the room when she heard Thompson’s announcement. “What?” she said. “How can that be?”

“Don’t tell your mother. She’s upset enough as it is,” Thompson said. “Calm her down. We don’t need her upsetting your dad and making things worse.”

“Howard, we need to set up a perimeter and guard the crime scene,” Sergeant Truitt ordered. “Take the front door.”

While the medics worked on her husband inside, Celeste sat on the steps smoking. Later, the officers would disagree about her demeanor. Some said she appeared visibly upset and shaken, concerned about her husband’s welfare, others that she was eerily calm. One would say that Celeste cried but shed no tears.

The Dennisons, who’d been awakened by the squad cars, rushed over when they saw the ambulance. Bob ran up to one officer. “I’m a doctor,” he said. “Can I help?” The officer turned him away. Bess tried to comfort Celeste, holding her hand and talking to her. When Celeste saw her, she became hysterical again. Kristina put her arm around her mother and reassured her.

“He’ll be okay, Mom,” she said. “He’ll be fine. I know it.”

“It was like Kristina came of age that night,” Bess would say later. “She was so protective of her mother. She took charge.”

“Would you call Jennifer?” Kristina asked Bess. “She’s at the lake house.”

Bess Dennison agreed, just as the STAR Flight helicopter hovered overhead, its searchlight scanning for a place to land. Squad cars set up a barrier to hold back cars, giving it room to put down on the road. As Steve was carried on a stretcher past her, Celeste jumped up, but the EMS workers didn’t stop.

Minutes later Celeste and Kristina were put into a squad car to follow the helicopter to the hospital. As they pulled onto Toro Canyon, Kristina saw Justin on the side of the road. She’d called him earlier, and he’d been arguing with officers, trying to get through the line of squad cars and to the house.

“We’re on our way to Brackenridge Hospital,” she shouted. “Meet us there.”

In the squad car, the officer driving mentioned the shotgun shell.

“Steve was shot?” Celeste asked, and then she began wailing.

At that same time in the house on Toro Canyon, much attention was being paid to the shotgun shell. In the paramedic’s rush, it had been pushed across the floor, where it lay, clear evidence that Steve’s injuries weren’t at all mysterious. No strange phenomenon had occurred. Instead it was a clear case of attempted murder.

Even before Steve had been whisked away, the officers began securing the crime scene and sweeping the house. There was much they didn’t know, including if the assailant was still inside, hiding somewhere and ready to jump out at them or shoot at them from the shadows.

Deputy Howard guarded the front door, logging who went in and out. Inside, Thompson checked the other doors. He found two unlocked, one going out to the back patio and the pool, the other to a living room porch that had poor accessibility. From experience, Thompson knew that finding unlocked doors wasn’t an unusual occurrence in a big house like the Beards’. It still seemed odd, however, that when they searched, they found no signs of forced entry.
How would the assailant know which door would be unlocked?
Howard wondered.

The more Deputy Thompson looked around, the more suspicious he became. Drawers in the cavernous master bedroom, closets, and vanities yawned open, the contents akimbo, but in a strangely orderly fashion. Rather than the chaos of a burglary scene, the Beard house looked, he’d say later, “like an amateur ransacking.”

With the house a crime scene—and if Steve died, a murder scene—the criminal investigation unit was called in. The first to arrive was Sergeant Paul Knight, followed by Detective Rick Wines. Sergeant Truitt briefed Knight, a fortyish man with a boyish face framed by graying hair, and Wines, lanky and tall with shock white hair and a neatly trimmed goatee. Knight had a laid-back manner with a sardonic smile, while Wines’s sharp features matched his hawklike demeanor and intent eyes that surveyed the room, seeming to absorb the scene. “One heck of a house,” Wines said.

“Sure is,” Knight agreed. “A shooting in this neighborhood is going to make headlines.”

To that, Wines nodded. They both knew everything they did that night could one day be put under a microscope in a courtroom. “I’ll handle things here,” Wines told Knight. “Why don’t you go to the hospital and talk to the family?”

Sergeant Knight agreed and left.

At the house, Wines, a Vietnam vet who’d worked as a cop for seventeen years, walked the scene. The house looked orderly, except for a living room lamp that lay on its side on the floor. It didn’t appear to have been knocked over, but instead carefully laid down. In the master bathroom he found what the other officers had pondered before: clothing protruding from open dresser drawers. After seventeen years on the force, Wines had seen many burglary scenes. This didn’t look like anything in his experience. It was too precisely done, not the chaos a thief causes looking for valuables.

Now that’s odd,
Wines thought.
Really odd.

At Brackenridge at about five-thirty that morning, Knight learned that Steve was in critical condition and in surgery. His wounds were extensive. The bullet had shredded the lower right quadrant of his abdomen. He’d lost blood, suffered intestinal damage, and had been exposed to serious infection.

Unable to interview the victim, Knight found Celeste and Kristina in a family waiting room with the officer who had transported them there. He introduced himself and then explained that he was investigating the shooting. He’d brought a lab tech with him who had an absorption kit, swabs to use to detect gunpowder through the presence of nitrates and sulfides.

“You don’t think I did it, do you?” Celeste asked.

“It’s routine,” he said.

“Am I a suspect?”

“We’re just trying to rule people out,” he said, thinking it odd that she’d be so concerned about being a suspect at such an early stage of the investigation. With that, Celeste and Kristina quickly agreed, holding out their hands for the lab tech to swab.

When that was done and the tests were negative, Knight asked questions.

“Any idea who would want to hurt your husband?” he asked.