The 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.
“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.
“We’re here to ask a few questions,” Knight said. “Do you know Steven Beard?”
“Sure,” Tracey said. “Celeste’s husband.”
“He’s been shot,” Wines said. He didn’t see surprise on Tracey’s face, but dread.
“Can we come in?” Knight asked.
“Sure,” Tracey said.
In the living room Wines asked, “Do you know why anyone would shoot Mr. Beard?”
“No. Do I need an attorney?” Tracey asked.
“Not unless you think you do,” Knight answered.
Under questioning, Tracey said that she and Celeste had met at St. David’s, in the psychiatric unit, after they’d both attempted suicide. “We had a brief affair,” she told the officers. “It didn’t mean anything to either one of us. Now we’re just friends.”
“When did you last talk to Mrs. Beard?” Wines asked.
“I’m not sure. I guess it was Thursday or Friday.”
As well as listening to Tracey, Wines watched her body language. While she appeared relaxed, her eyes flicked about the room, never resting on his face or Knight’s.
“Do you have a gun?” Knight asked.
“I have a shotgun I use to shoot skeet,” Tracey said. “A .20 gauge.”
“We’d like to see it,” Knight said. “Will you get it for me?”
Tracey hesitated.
“We can go get it, or I’ll wait here while Detective Wines gets a search warrant and we’ll find it ourselves,” Knight said. “Take your pick.”
With that, Tracey led them to a closet in a back bedroom she used as an office. From inside, she pulled the Franchi shotgun in its zippered case and handed it to Wines. The smell of cleaning fluid was so strong he didn’t have to ask if it had been recently cleaned.
“When’s the last time you fired this?” Knight asked.
“I shot skeet Thursday night,” she said.
“Can we take this downtown to ballistics?”
“Sure,” Tracey said.
She felt her chest tighten when he said, “We’d like you to come downtown to our office and make a statement.”
Hours later Tracey had signed a statement at the Travis County Sheriff’s Department headquarters. In it she described meeting Celeste at St. David’s and then Timberlawn, and said again that they’d had a brief affair. Since returning to Austin, she said, they were just friends. “We talked on the telephone some and went shopping a couple of times.” When it came to Steve, Tracey said Celeste told her that she didn’t sleep with him and that they didn’t have a good relationship. “There was no sex in the marriage, and I think that her depression was caused by her relationship with him,” she said. When asked where she’d been at the time of the murder, Tracey said she’d had a few beers, ate pizza, and then went to bed. “I did not shoot Steve Beard, and I do not know who did,” she said.
Wines brought Tracey back to the house on Wilson. As she turned to walk inside, he said, “You’ll be hearing from us again.”
Paul Beard was the first of the older children to hear of their father’s shooting. He called the house Saturday to wish Steve a good trip to Europe. Christopher Doose answered and told him what had happened. Wines got on the telephone and explained what he knew about Steve’s condition.
“Who shot him?” Paul demanded.
“We’re investigating,” Wines said.
“Make sure you take a good look at his wife,” Paul said.
As soon as he hung up the telephone, Paul said to his wife, Kim, “Celeste is behind this. I’d be willing to bet my life on it.”
That afternoon Paul left calls for his brother, Steve, and sister, Becky.
Meanwhile, at the hospital, Celeste was making phone calls of her own, one to Steve’s Austin banker, Chuck Fuqua. “Steve’s in the hospital and can’t take care of the bills,” she said. “I want to be put on his bank accounts.”
Fuqua refused, but Celeste insisted. Then Fuqua reminded her that she had $10,000 in traveler’s checks Steve had bought for the trip. “Use those,” he said.
“What happens when those are gone?”
“We’ll work it out,” Fuqua said. “That should carry you over for now.”
When Fuqua wouldn’t release Steve’s money to her, Celeste called C.W. Beard, Steve’s cousin and his Dallas banker. The frantic message on his machine said, “Steve’s been shot, and I need to be put on his bank accounts.”
That afternoon, Celeste, Dawn Madigan, her friend from the lake, and Kristina and Jennifer returned to the house and picked up the Suburban. On the way back to the hospital, Celeste pulled over to a Dumpster. From under the seat she retrieved an empty Everclear bottle and a book entitled The Poor Man’s James Bond. On the cover it touted recipes for poisons and explosives. Nearly unable to believe what she’d just seen, Jennifer looked at Kristina, hoping she’d recognize the importance of the book. Instead Kristina stared out the window, looking frightened and sad.
About then, Celeste’s cell phone rang.
“I’ve been questioned,” Tracey said. “The cops just left. And they took my shotgun.”
“Steve’s not doing very well,” Celeste said. “I’ll call you back.”
Then the phone went dead.
At the hospital, Justin prodded Kristina. “Why would Tracey do this? Isn’t it strange that Celeste took Meagan to the lake house?”
Kristina ignored his insinuations, not wanting to hear what he was saying.
When the teens were together, they made small talk. Christopher and Jennifer didn’t know where Justin stood, if he’d tell Kristina that they believed Celeste was involved. “We couldn’t trust her,” says Jennifer. “We knew how loyal she was to our mom.”
Her hands shaking and tears clouding her eyes, Tracey’s next call was to Philip Presse, who’d been at the hospital much of the day with Celeste. Weeks earlier, Celeste had referred her to him to handle her DWI, and she’d hired him to represent her. Now she explained that the police had questioned her and taken her shotgun for ballistics. “I’m expecting it to match,” she said. When she started to talk about Celeste, Presse stopped her. He was already representing Celeste, he said, and he couldn’t talk to her. But he could refer her to another attorney, a man named Keith Hampton, who shared his office building. “He’s good and he handles criminal cases,” Presse said.
Tracey hung up and immediately dialed Hampton’s number. When he got on the phone, she launched into her explanation again, but Hampton stopped her. “I think we need to talk at the office,” he said. “When can you come in?”
Within an hour Tracey was seated in Hampton’s office, detailing her relationship with Celeste and the circumstances surrounding the shooting, as the attorney’s eyes grew wide. “Celeste had told me that you don’t tell an attorney the truth. You tell him what you want him to represent,” Tracey said later. “But I didn’t believe that. I thought he should know everything, so he wouldn’t be blindsided.”
When she finished, Tracey told Hampton there was one thing she would never consider: turning on Celeste. “I pulled the trigger, and I’m taking the fall,” she said. “I’m telling you the rest because I think you need to know. But I don’t want you to use it.”
Hampton explained what they could do, including fighting the admissibility of the weapon, since Knight and Wines hadn’t had a search warrant. “And we could talk to the D.A. about a deal,” he said. “If you’re willing to tell the whole story… ”
“Absolutely not,” Tracey said. “Do what you can but if this thing goes bad, I don’t want Celeste involved.”
Afterward, Keith Hampton had a problem. He’d just been told that Celeste planned the shooting, that she wanted Steve dead. With Celeste at the hospital, Steve could still be in danger, and he had a duty to alert someone to keep her from finding a way to finish Steve off in the ICU. Hampton called Philip Presse. When Presse got off the telephone, he talked to Celeste, then put in a call for Charles Burton, Austin’s premier criminal attorney, to represent her.
Early that evening Celeste and the twins were allowed into Steve’s room. The girls were shocked by his condition. He was pale and barely responsive. When Jennifer touched his hand, it felt stone cold. He tried to talk, but the tubes running down his throat made it impossible. Instead they read his lips.
“Why am I here?” he asked.
“Someone shot you,” Kristina explained. “You’ve had an operation.”
Steve shook his head no and tears ran down his cheeks.
“Oh, Steve,” Celeste said, standing at his bedside, the picture of the perfect wife. She held his hand. “You’ll be all right. I love you.”