She Wanted It All - Kathryn Casey [91]
“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