She Wanted It All - Kathryn Casey [100]
He smiled and held her hand.
Steve had another visitor that day, Harold Entz, a state district judge from Dallas and his old friend. This time Becky intervened to get him in to see Steve, who held his hand, squeezing hard, happy to see him. Days later, after the judge returned home, Celeste called, screaming that he wasn’t ever allowed to visit Steve again. Entz hung up on her.
At BookPeople that Monday after the shooting, Tracey’s employees noticed she was distracted and jumpy. They were all curious about the shooting at the Beard house, asking what she knew and if she’d heard from Celeste. “I can’t really talk to her now. She’s busy,” Tracey told one. “I don’t know anything about what happened.”
Yet, the two women had been talking on the telephone throughout the weekend, calling from pay phones, in case their home phones were tapped.
“How’s Steve?” Tracey asked.
“Not good,” Celeste replied. “I can’t believe he hasn’t died.”
Then Tracey asked something she’d wondered since the moment she learned that a shotgun shell had been found on the scene. “Why didn’t you pick up the shell?”
“I fell asleep,” Celeste answered. “I didn’t wake up until the police broke into the house. By then it was too late.”
By the time Charles Burton arrived at the Marriott, Celeste had made sure both the twins knew what she wanted them to say. As always, the girls did as they were told, saying Celeste was devoted to Steve.
After Burton left, Celeste pulled Kristina to the side, away from the other teens.
“He says Tracey is implicating me,” she told her. “That’s why I need an attorney, and why we have to be careful what we tell people.”
Later at the hospital, Wines approached Kristina asking for the family’s phone numbers. There were three lines coming into the Beard house; each of the Cadillacs had a car phone; plus all four of them, Celeste, Steve, Kristina, and Jennifer, had cell phones. It was a maze of phone numbers to weed through. But when Celeste saw Kristina talking to the detective, she shouted at her: “Kristina, come over here, now.”
Quietly she whispered in her daughter’s ear, “I don’t want you talking to police or anyone from the D.A.’s Office. They’re people we all need to be afraid of.”
The next morning Wines drew up a request for a subpoena for all the Beard family phone records and Tracey Tarlton’s cell and home phones. That done, he headed back to the hospital. When he got there, the sign was still on Steve’s door and Celeste was standing guard. Rather than cause a scene, Wines decided to put off interviewing Steve, who nurses said was resting comfortably but was still in guarded condition.
Back at his office, he ran a more complete search on Tracey, coming up with not just her DWI, but the run-in she’d had with Reginald Breaux at the convenience store. Next, he expanded the search, looking for criminal records on Celeste. After a bit of searching, the database pulled up her insurance fraud conviction in Arizona. It was a minor charge, but to Wines it opened up another window into her true identity.
That done, he checked in at the District Attorney’s Office and found out that Bill Mange had been assigned to the case. Wines had worked with Mange before and liked him. He was a good, resourceful prosecutor.
“Let me know what you find out from ballistics,” Mange told him. From that point on there was little Wines could do but wait.
Finally, on the afternoon of Thursday, October 7, five days after the shooting, Wines stood outside Sergeant Knight’s door and grinned.
“Ballistics got a match,” he said. “We’ve got an arrest to make.”
The report on the shell casing came back, and, as they’d both suspected, Jennifer’s shotgun was easily ruled out. Tracey’s Franchi, however, was an exact match. The rest of that day,