She Wanted It All - Kathryn Casey [89]
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.
Chapter
12
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