She Wanted It All - Kathryn Casey [102]
“No,” Celeste insisted. “She must be calling and hanging up.”
Not long after, Celeste changed the password on her voice mail, so the girls could no longer pick up her calls.
With Tracey now charged, Wines had to inform Steve of her arrest. Ignoring the sign on the door, he went inside and found Steve still hooked up to a ventilator and appearing as if each breath might be his last. He took the news with little emotion and showed no surprise. After the detective left, Steve motioned for a pen and pad from the nurses. “Let my family in to see me,” he wrote. Perhaps he reasoned that now he knew who the shooter was, and it wasn’t Celeste.
Not knowing Celeste had already learned about the arrest from Tracey, Wines’s last task that day was to tell her. He called Charles Burton and learned that she and the girls had changed hotels and were now staying at a La Quinta Inn near the hospital. When he arrived, the desk clerk called upstairs. “You have a visitor,” he said.
“She doesn’t want to see anyone,” the man said when he hung up.
Wines pulled out his badge. “Tell Mrs. Beard that Detective Wines wants to talk to her.”
Minutes later Celeste and the twins walked into the lobby. When Wines started talking, she pulled him outside, away from the ears of the clerk.
“Am I a suspect?” she asked.
“I’m here to tell you we arrested Tracey,” Wines said.
“Is the investigation closed?”
“No,” he said. She frowned when he added, “We’re still investigating.”
Although it had been nearly a week since the shooting, Steve’s outlook remained dire. Much of the time he was heavily drugged and asleep. Over the coming weeks, Dr. Coscia would first try to stabilize Steve and then wean him from the ventilator. Repeatedly he’d have to be put back on as his oxygen levels plummeted. Since the gunshot tore through his intestines, it had polluted Steve’s body with debris, raising the risk of serious infection. Signs at the door to his room asked visitors to don surgical gowns and wash their hands, to protect him from what in others might be a minor cold or flu, but to Steve could prove fatal.
Justin said nothing of his suspicions to Kristina, but he watched Celeste carefully. More than once he saw her walk into Steve’s room without washing her hands. Once, when she had a sore throat, she went into his room in the ICU anyway. Inside, she took off her mask and kissed Steve full on the lips. Later, Justin reasoned that he was afraid to tell anyone what he was thinking. If he did, it would make it real.
At times Steve cried, depressed. At other moments, with the kids, he smiled, mouthing that the IV fluids and ice chips didn’t match real food. Once, Jennifer put her ear to his lips, and he whispered, “I see hamburgers in my dreams.”
Jen laughed, but when Steve chuckled, he stopped, holding his abdomen and squeezing the button on the drug dispenser for more pain killers. By then doctors had taken him in for more surgeries, including cutting a tracheotomy, a hole in his throat for the breathing tube. He was still being fed through tubes going directly into his stomach. Daily, nurses debreeded his wounds, cleaning out infection.
Long term, no one could predict how he’d mend, but the doctors agreed he’d be in a wheelchair for the foreseeable future. Although before the shooting he’d been a robust man, Steve was now in constant pain, bedridden and feeble, dependent on others to do the simplest tasks. The social workers talked to Celeste and Kristina about the future, a series of operations in which skin grafts would be transplanted over his gaping wounds. Once he healed, he’d be transferred to a rehab facility, where Celeste would be taught to care for him. Every conversation with his doctors began with, “If Mr. Beard survives…”
Even with Steve battling for his life, Celeste’s attention seemed drawn not to him but to his accounts at the Bank of America, where his money remained out of her grasp. While Steve