She Wanted It All - Kathryn Casey [92]
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