03.She.Wanted.It.All.2005 (21 page)

“No,” Celeste said.

“Anyone mad at him, have any reason to be angry with him?”

“No,” she said again.

Celeste went on to detail that evening. She said Steve had gone to bed about nine or nine-thirty. She’d taken a ride to the lake house to see her daughter and her friends, returning before midnight and stopping at a Texaco station on Bee Caves Road for gas. It struck Knight as peculiar when Celeste
offered, “You can check on it. They’d have a record of the transaction.”

She then went on to tell Knight that Steve had cashed a check that afternoon for money for the girls to spend while she and Steve were in Europe. “He had a thousand dollars in his wallet,” she said. Knight felt uneasy again when she then offered a motive for the shooting, “If it’s not there, this must have been a robbery.”

Later Knight would say that much of the way Celeste acted that night seemed peculiar. It was when he left to get an update from a nurse on Steve’s condition that Celeste had her first moments alone with Kristina. Still stunned from all that had happened, and worried about her mother, Kristina listened intently as her mother whispered: “The police are going to ask who could have done this. No matter what, don’t mention Tracey’s name. She’s not involved in this. Call Jennifer and the others and tell them, too.”

Kristina thought her mother’s request odd, but the obedient daughter, she did as she was told. As soon as she called Justin on his cell phone to tell him, he, too, wondered,
Why would Celeste say that?
When he arrived at the hospital, Kristina left Celeste in a waiting room and ran up to hug him.

“Is Steve all right? Where is he?” he asked.

“In surgery,” Kristina answered, crying. “He’s hurt bad. Really bad.”

Justin and Kristina were still embracing when Knight returned and noticed Justin. As he had with Celeste and Kristina, he introduced himself and then asked if the lab tech could do a swab test. Justin agreed. Then Knight asked the same question he’d asked Celeste earlier. “Do you know anyone who might want to hurt Steve?”

Justin looked around to be sure Celeste wasn’t listening. She was nowhere to be seen. He still worried. Celeste had a
way of finding things out. But he had to say what was on his mind. “You won’t tell Celeste if I tell you, right?”

“I won’t tell Mrs. Beard,” Knight agreed.

“You need to talk to Tracey Tarlton. My guess is that she did it.”

Once Tracey’s name had been mentioned, Kristina couldn’t hold back. She’d been upset when her mother ordered her to remain silent, wanting to do all she could to find the person who’d hurt Steve. “Tracey’s in love with my mom,” she said. “And she has guns. One night, when she was threatening to kill herself, I went there and took two away and turned them in to the police.”

Sergeant Knight made notes, listening carefully. “Where do I find this woman?” he asked.

“She has a house near St. Edward’s, in south Austin,” Kristina said.

About that time, Christopher and Jennifer walked in. The news had shaken Jennifer badly. She’d been hysterical when she got off the telephone, and Amy and Christopher had to calm her. She didn’t stop crying until halfway to the hospital in the car. Now she threw her arms around her sister and the two twins cried in each other’s arms.

After hugs and tears, they all sat in the waiting room, bunched together in a circle, seated on chairs while Kristina and Justin told them the little they knew about Steve’s condition: He was critical and undergoing surgery. Wanting to make the session as relaxed as possible, Knight sat down with them. When he asked Christopher and Jen who might have shot Steve, Christopher immediately said, “You can’t tell Celeste we said this, because she’d make our lives hell, but we think it was Tracey Tarlton.”

Meanwhile, outside the hospital, Amy had stayed with Celeste, who leaned against the building smoking one of her
Marlboro Light 100s. With Steve precariously close to death, Amy watched her carefully, recalling what Celeste had once told her—that when Steve died she’d act so upset, no one would suspect she never loved him.

When Amy walked inside, she found the others with Sergeant Knight.

“So who do you think might have done this?” he asked her.

Amy, who thought of Steve Beard like a grandfather, didn’t hesitate.

“Tracey Tarlton,” she said.

Knight was intrigued. All five teens agreed Tracey had a motive, but Celeste hadn’t brought up her name. What was she hiding? Before leaving to pursue the lead he’d just been handed, he gave Celeste another opportunity to help solve her husband’s shooting.

“Does anyone have any reason to be angry with your husband?” he asked again when he found her in the waiting room.

“No,” she said.

“Is there anyone who might want him out of the way because of feelings about you?”

“No.”

Within a few hours of the shooting, word was out, and friends began arriving at Brackenridge. The first were Philip Presse, the attorney, and his wife, Ana, who’d been Celeste’s matron of honor at her wedding to Steve. Celeste was crying, and Ana gave her a Xanax to help her relax. Soon, Gus and Linda Voelzel, and the Baumans and Ray McEachern, arrived.

“What happened?” Gus asked.

“Someone shot Steve,” Celeste said. They asked questions, but Celeste’s replies supplied few answers. Many of the things she said didn’t make sense. At one point she
turned to Linda and insisted, “There aren’t any guns in our house.”

Why is she telling me that?
Linda wondered.

“Where was Meagan?” Linda asked. “Didn’t she bark?”

“She was at the lake house with the kids,” Celeste said.

The Voelzels exchanged bewildered glances; Steve’s friends knew the old lab followed him like an obedient puppy. Then Celeste said something that left them all staring at her, searching her face for answers: Steve hadn’t put the alarm on that night.

“Steve was neurotic about that alarm, made sure it was on every night,” says McEachern. “There was no way he was the one who left it off.”

A deputy stood nearby. While Celeste talked to the others, McEachern eased over to his side. “You watch that woman,” he whispered, pointing to Celeste. “If she gets the chance, she’ll pull the plug and finish him off.”

“You’re just upset,” the deputy said. “We tested her for residue. She didn’t fire a gun.”

“I don’t care what you tested. He’s in danger with her here,” Ray answered.

As McEachern spoke, Celeste praised Steve to the others and pledged her love for him. She said she didn’t think she could live without him. And she cried.

With the exception of Kristina, the teens, too, were looking at Celeste suspiciously. As they discussed the events of that night, there were just too many oddities. Why did Celeste take Meagan to the lake? Why did she say the boys weren’t allowed to sleep over and send Christopher, Amy, and Jennifer to the lake house? Of them all, Jennifer was the most certain that her mother had some involvement in the shooting. Celeste was ruthless; about that she had no doubt. In the hospital, Jennifer looked across at Kristina, who hovered protectively near their mother. She made a decision
there, at that moment. She’d keep her distance from Celeste and watch. But she wouldn’t tell Kristina her suspicions. “I love Kristina to death,” she says. “But I didn’t trust her not to tell our mother.”

As Jennifer thought the situation through, she believed her mother was not only involved with the shooting but, under the right circumstances, capable of hurting not only Steve, but her and Kristina. She considered fleeing somewhere Celeste couldn’t find her. But she couldn’t. “Kristina wouldn’t go, and I would never leave her behind.”

Inside an operating room, doctors attempted to piece together Steve’s abdomen. The birdshot had entered his body and fanned out, until it appeared on a portable X ray like a thin spray of white dots. His lungs already weak from asthma, he struggled to breathe on his own, so they inserted a ventilator. Using a tiny camera to guide him, Dr. Robert Coscia, a trauma surgeon, worked to repair the damage. In places, Steve’s abdomen looked like ground meat. Parts of his skin were already decaying, poisoning his system. Coscia slowly and carefully resectioned his stomach and removed part of his colon and intestine, inserting an ileostomy. With so much to repair, he didn’t have enough undamaged skin to close. Instead, he pieced Vicryl, six-by-six-inch panels of surgical mesh, over the wound. Eventually, if Steve lived, he’d require skin grafts, but for the time being Coscia wanted him out of surgery and stabilizing. With his enlarged heart and weak lungs, the longer he spent in the operating room, the more dangerous his situation became.

“At best, he has a fifty-fifty chance,” Dr. Coscia told Celeste and the teens after the operation. “There’s a good possibility that he won’t make it through the night.”

As Kristina held her, Celeste sobbed.

At the Toro Canyon house, Detective Wines made plans to have the place thoroughly searched and to bring in the forensic team. First, he wanted to make sure anything they found would later be admissible in court. He called Knight at the hospital. “Ask Mrs. Beard to sign a consent-to-search for us,” he said. In case she refused, Wines then left and went to his office to write up a search warrant. That turned out to be unnecessary. Knight called just after he arrived and said Celeste had signed the forms. On the phone, Wines told Knight about all he’d noted at the house, including what looked to be a staged burglary. Knight told Wines about the teens’ identification of Tracey Tarlton as a possible suspect.

“I’ll come to the hospital,” Wines said. “Let’s see if we can talk to Mr. Beard.”

At 9:30
A.M
., Wines arrived at Brackenridge, and he and Knight went to the nurse in charge of the surgical ICU and flashed their badges. “We need to talk to Mr. Beard,” he said. With no objection, she led them into his room.

In the bed, surrounded by machines pumping him with antibiotics, painkillers, and fluids, Steve had tubes protruding from his throat and nose. His abdomen was covered by layers of gauze. He’d been opened and pieced back together, but not all the birdshot had been removed. Some lay dangerously close to vital organs, including his heart.

“Mr. Beard,” Wines said. “Would it be all right if we ask you some questions?”

In terrible pain, Steve nodded.

“Did you see who did this to you?” he asked.

Steve tried to shake his head no, but the tubes made it impossible. The nurse brought over paper and a pen, but he was too weak to write.

“Mr. Beard, try to communicate by blinking. One for yes, two for no,” Knight said.

Steve blinked once for yes.

“Did you see who did this to you?”

Steve blinked twice for no.

The two officers went through a list of questions that morning, but came away with little. Steve didn’t know who had shot him, but when Tracey’s name came up, he blinked once. Yes, he knew her.

“Do you think this has anything to do with anyone in your family?” Wines asked.

Steve blinked once for yes.

When it appeared the questioning was taking a toll, Wines and Knight turned to leave. For the first time they noticed Celeste, glaring at them through the ICU window with what Wines would later describe as “pure hate.”

Back at Toro Canyon the crime scene unit took over. They didn’t find Steve’s wallet or the thousand dollars Celeste had mentioned. When Sergeant Knight arrived, however, he found something he judged interesting. In the garage were three cars, two Cadillacs and a Ford Suburban. All had car phones, but Celeste’s Cadillac also had a Nokia cell phone in the center counsel. Knight flipped through the recently called numbers and came up with two of special interest: “Tracey cell” and “Tracey home.”

As the police searched, Kristina returned home. Steve’s outlook wasn’t good, and she’d come home to get his identification and insurance information. In the master bathroom, she searched for his wallet. It was gone. She couldn’t find his Baume & Mercier watch, or his sapphire ring. While she rummaged around, Knight walked in.

“I’ve got a few questions,” he told Kristina. “Can we talk?”

As exhausted as she was, Kristina agreed.

At the hospital, Celeste had warned Kristina to be wary of the police, that they could turn things around and make it appear
that one of them was involved in the shooting. Now, in response to his questions, Kristina was nervous, trying to remember what her mother had coached her to say. When he asked, she told the lies that Celeste had told her to, that her mother had been home before midnight and that they talked briefly before going to sleep.

“How did your mother seem?” Knight asked.

“Normal,” Kristina answered.

“Is it unusual for her to sleep in your room?”

“She does that sometimes,” Kristina said.

Something had been mentioned to Knight on the scene— that when the police arrived, Celeste was wearing a bra under her nightclothes. “Is that unusual?” he asked.

“No,” Kristina answered. “Mom always does that, because she was abused as a kid.”

Little of interest was taken from the Toro Canyon house during the search that day, nothing beyond the shotgun shell that would yield any clues. From there Knight and Wines returned to their office, where they ran a computer check on Tracey Tarlton that produced a list of addresses. Using information Knight had gleaned from the teenagers, they narrowed the address down to one on Wilson Street, on Austin’s near south side. They also checked Tracey’s car registration and wrote down the license number on her maroon Nissan Pathfinder. Then they checked for weapons permits.

“Here we go!” Wines said when he discovered that Tracey was the owner of a .20 gauge shotgun, the same caliber as the casing found in Steve Beard’s bedroom.

At three that afternoon Knight and Wines drove to the address on Wilson Street and parked in front of the address on Tracey’s driver’s license. The Pathfinder was in the driveway. They walked up to the front door of the unremarkable
ranch-style house in the working class neighborhood and Knight knocked.

Tracey answered, as if she’d been waiting for them.