by LENA DIAZ,
She rolled the window up and opened the door.
He reached for her hand. She hesitated, bracing herself not to jerk away when his much larger hand closed around hers. But when he touched her, to her surprise and relief, she didn’t feel nausea or dread. Unlike her husband’s touch, the warmth and strength in Luke’s hand made her feel something she hadn’t felt in years...safe.
She smiled up at him, but he was too busy scanning the yard and street out front to notice. As she stood, another sharp pain shot through her belly, making her wince. She was glad Luke hadn’t seen that. It had been difficult enough to admit to a stranger that she was afraid of her own husband. It would be beyond humiliating for Luke to even suspect the extent of her cowardice over the years, to learn just how much she’d endured, all because she’d been too weak to stand up for herself.
A warm breeze filtered through the trees overhead, stirring his lightweight leather jacket. She’d wondered why he wore a jacket in the summer, but now she knew: to conceal the gun holstered on the hip pocket of his jeans. She’d never been this close to a gun before and had always assumed it would terrify her. But the sight of his weapon was actually reassuring. Richard might laugh at her puny attempts to deflect his blows, but even her husband wasn’t immune to the ravages of a well-aimed bullet.
Luke stayed at her back as she walked the short distance to the front stoop, but as soon as she unlocked the door, he rushed her into the foyer and flipped the dead bolt behind them.
His mouth tightened into a thin line. “No security alarm?”
“Not yet. I only rented the house a little over a week ago.” She rubbed her hands up and down her arms. “We’ve never had one at the mansion. Richard didn’t like the inconvenience of having to worry about using a keypad if he decided to step outside at night.”
“You didn’t need one at the mansion because the estate was gated and had security guards watching it 24/7. I’ll get someone out here today to install one.”
He gently pushed her aside as he opened the hall-closet door, apparently searching for intruders. Next, he glanced through the archway to their right into the family room, then back down the hallway to their left. “Stay here while I check the bedrooms.”
He disappeared down the short hall. It took him less than a minute to search the two bedrooms and bath. Then he was back at her side in the foyer.
“I assume the kitchen is through the family room?” he asked.
“Yes, through that other archway.” She didn’t bother to add that this was her first time seeing the house in person. Leslie had handled everything for her: helping her find the house, arranging for the lease, getting the key. Caroline had only seen the house online and knew the layout from the virtual tour. There was never a chance for her to physically go to the house. Richard would never have let her out of his sight long enough for that.
Luke headed into the family room, which had a panoramic view of both the street out front and the fenced backyard. The long, narrow style of the house was one of the primary reasons Caroline had chosen it. When Richard eventually discovered where she was—and she didn’t doubt that he would—she wanted to see him coming. And with both front-and rear-facing windows in most of the rooms, she’d always have an exit nearby so she could flee if she had to.
After looking behind the couch and the few other places big enough to hide someone, Luke continued into the kitchen.
A moment later, the sound of his deep voice carried to Caroline, in a one-sided conversation she couldn’t quite make out. He must be talking to someone on the phone. Obviously there wasn’t anything to worry about if he could take the time for that.
She wiped her brow, surprised to find it damp with perspiration. The inside of the house was nice and cool, both from the air conditioner and because of the majestic, Spanish moss–dripping oak trees that hung over the roof, shading it from the merciless summer sun.
Maybe she was catching a cold, or the flu. That would explain why she was achy all over, even in places where Richard hadn’t hit her. She dropped her purse on one of the end tables that had come with the furnished cottage and headed toward the kitchen. When she stepped into the entryway, she froze.
On the far side of the room, Luke was talking to someone on his cell phone. But on the white tile floor at his feet, lying in a pool of blood, was Richard Ashton III.
The room began to spin. Richard had found her already. How? It was a trick. It had to be. Any second now he would jump up and point an accusing finger at her. Then he’d teach her another lesson. Her eyes widened as she stared at him. The blood. No, no, no. The blood was soaking into his favorite Italian suit—the suit he’d worn the day they met. He’d kill her if that suit was ruined.
She took a step toward him, then stopped. She started shaking. Someone called her name. Her world tilted. Everything went black.
* * *
LUKE SHOT AN aggravated glance at the balding Chatham County police officer sitting across from him in the E.R. waiting room. “I’ve already told you all this, Detective Cornell.”
“Then tell me again. You said you’ve never met Mrs. Ashton before today?”
“That’s right.”
“What time did she arrive at your office?”
“About 9:10.”
Cornell wrote something on the old-fashioned little spiral notebook he carried. “And she was in your office how long?”
“Ten minutes, give or take. She wanted to hire a bodyguard. She signed a boilerplate contract, gave me a retainer—”
“How much?”
“How much what?”
“How much was the retainer?”
Luke shook his head. He was never big on patience anyway, but answering the detective’s relentless questions had destroyed what little patience he had.
“My standard fee for a full-time assignment, two thousand a week, plus expenses.”
The detective whistled. “Sounds steep.”
“You get what you pay for. Look, I want to check on Mrs. Ashton.”
“There’s no point in checking with the nurse again. Once a doctor has time to examine her, we’ll be updated about why she fainted.”
Luke laughed without humor. “She didn’t just ‘faint.’ There’s something wrong with her. I couldn’t wake her up. And there were bruises on her wrists, bruises that looked like handprints. Do you know how hard someone would have to squeeze a woman’s wrist to leave marks like that?”
“You think her husband hurt her?”
“Don’t you?”
He shrugged. “You think she was justified in killing her husband?”
Luke stilled. “You don’t seriously think she’s the one who killed him.”
“She’s the wife. She’s the first person I’ll look at.”
“Richard Ashton was already dead when we arrived at the house. And if she’s the one who killed him, why would she hire a bodyguard?”
Detective Cornell slid his notepad and pen into his shirt pocket and sank back against the unyielding hard plastic chair as if it was the most comfortable of recliners. “Sounds like a good defense, something that might give the jurors reasonable doubt. Pretty smart, if you ask me.”
“Do you know the time of death yet to see if she has an alibi?”
“No. And that’s the main reason I haven’t arrested her.”
“That, and the fact that she’s unconscious, I suppose.” He couldn’t help the sarcasm that crept into his tone.
Cornell smiled as if amused by Luke’s statement. “Yep. There’s that, too.”
Luke stared at the exasperating police officer. Part of him thought the detective was latching on to the easiest explanation, but another part of him agreed with Cornell. If Caroline Ashton was abused, as Luke believed, she might have planned her revenge. She may have used Luke and his company
as part of that plan so someone would be with her when she “discovered” her husband’s body.
That possibility didn’t sit well with him. But he’d signed a contract, and he’d given her his promise. He was duty-bound to protect her until the contract expired this time next week, or until she released him from that promise.
“There’s another angle to consider,” Luke said. “The killer’s target may have been Mrs. Ashton. After all, it was her house. The killer could have been waiting there for her, but the husband showed up. The killer may have felt cornered, so he shot Mr. Ashton and ran off.”
The detective pursed his mouth. “I won’t dismiss that out of hand. But it’s not high on my list of probable scenarios.”
It wasn’t high on Luke’s, either, but he was trying to keep more of an open mind than the jaded policeman across from him.
“I’ve got to make a call.” Luke shoved out of the hard, narrow chair he’d stuffed his body into for over two hours while waiting for a doctor to see Caroline Ashton.
He hurried outside the waiting area and turned his cell phone on. When Mitch answered his call, Luke didn’t waste time on small talk. “Have you found out anything?”
“Sure did. I called a buddy of mine who works for Stellar Security. He said they keep a log of everyone going in and out of the Ashton mansion, right down to the minute. And Mr. Ashton keeps a GPS tracker on his wife’s car. Can you believe that? I have a printout of every place she went this morning, with the exact times.”
A GPS tracker sounded invasive, controlling, which made Luke’s suspicions about abuse even stronger. Wouldn’t it be ironic if Richard Ashton’s attempt to keep a tether on his wife ended up proving her innocence? “Go ahead. Tell me.”
“Mr. Ashton left the house at 7:55. His wife left fifteen minutes later. She drove directly to a dry-cleaning company and stayed there for ten minutes. After that, she drove across town to Wiley & Harrison, again without making any stops along the way, arriving at precisely 8:40.”
“Wiley & Harrison, the law firm?”
“One and the same. Her visit at the law office lasted twelve minutes. After that, she headed down Highway 80, pulled over and stopped for fourteen additional minutes.”
“Any clue why?”
“You’ll have to ask her that.”
“Okay, then what.”
“You know the rest. She drove straight to our office, arriving at 9:12, hired us, and you followed her to the cottage, arriving at 9:47. You placed the 911 call four minutes later.”
Luke considered what Mitch had said. “I haven’t been told an official time of death yet, but Richard Ashton’s body was still warm when I checked for a pulse. From what you just told me, there’s no way she had the opportunity to kill him.”
“Doesn’t look like it.”
Some of the tension went out of him. It was only then that he realized how much he’d hoped Caroline Ashton was innocent. He was normally an excellent judge of character, a skill that helped immensely in his line of work. From the beginning, Caroline had seemed kind and caring, as evidenced by her concern about whether he might get hurt protecting her. She didn’t strike him as the type of woman who could murder someone, even if they deserved it.
“Thanks, Mitch.”
“You bet. You need me to follow up on anything else?”
“Not right now. Just keep the office going. I’ll call you later.”
He headed back into the waiting room. When he updated the detective about what he’d found out, disappointment flashed across the policeman’s face.
As if noticing Luke’s puzzlement, Cornell gave him a lopsided smile. “I’d hoped for a quick open-and-shut case. The coroner called while you were outside. He said the victim was killed within an hour of when the body was discovered. I already confirmed Mr. Ashton arrived at his office at 8:30 and left again at 8:45. His limo driver said he dropped Mr. Ashton off at the cottage, per his instructions, twenty minutes later. That would have been about the same time Mrs. Ashton arrived at your office. If everything you just told me checks out, she didn’t have the opportunity to shoot her husband.”
“His limo driver dropped him off? And left him there?”
“Apparently. I’ve got another detective interviewing the driver right now to find out more. I’m also sending someone over to your place of business to take a statement from this Mitch guy, the one you said can vouch that Mrs. Ashton was there this morning.”
“Mr. Dawson?” a voice called out. “Detective Cornell?” A doctor stood in the entrance to the waiting room, looking around at the various groups of people. Luke and Cornell both rose. The doctor hurried to them and introduced himself.
“Is Mrs. Ashton okay?” Luke asked.
“I’m hopeful for a good outcome. She’s in recovery now.”
“‘Hopeful’?” Luke said. “‘Recovery’? You had to operate?”
“She was bleeding internally, from a ruptured spleen. If she hadn’t gotten here when she did, she might not have made it.”
“Do you know how she was injured?” Cornell asked.
Luke shook his head. The answer was as obvious as the bruises on Caroline’s wrists.
The doctor’s jaw tightened. “I’ve got a pretty good idea. Follow me.”
He led them through the double doors and turned left down a brightly lit hall, stopping at a door marked Recovery. Inside, he brought them down a row of curtained-off enclosures to the last one at the end. He pulled the green curtain back to reveal Caroline Ashton, asleep, looking pale, vulnerable, her small body lost in the middle of the hospital bed. An IV tube ran from the back of her right hand to a bag suspended on a pole. A blood-pressure cuff was wrapped around her other arm. The monitor behind the bed beeped and displayed numbers and graphs as it tracked her vital signs.
The doctor waved to the bruises on her wrists.
For once, the detective wasn’t smiling. He hadn’t seen the bruises earlier, as Luke had. The sight of them now had his mouth pressing into a hard, thin line.
“I won’t disturb her to show you the other bruises,” the doctor said, keeping his voice low. “But I can tell you, there are plenty of them, across her abdomen, her back, her side, in places typically covered by clothing. Unless she was in several violent car wrecks recently, there’s only one obvious explanation. Someone beat her, viciously, repeatedly, over a period of several days, based on the coloration of the bruises. But that’s not half the story.”
He crossed the small space to a computer monitor on a rolling cart. After typing a few commands, he turned the screen around to reveal an X-ray.
“This,” he said, pointing to the screen, “is a healed hairline fracture on her right forearm. It was probably broken a few years ago.” He punched another button to reveal a new picture. “And this is another fracture, on her other forearm. Again, it’s healed, a relatively old injury, probably within the past eight or nine months.” He turned the monitor back around. “I could show you more scans, but they all show the same thing—a history of injuries. None of them were compound fractures, meaning they weren’t bad enough breaks to cause lasting damage or require setting. Which is probably why whoever did this to her was never forced to take her to a hospital. But those injuries should have been stabilized with a cast to aid in healing and to reduce her pain.”
Luke flinched and looked down at the bed. How could someone do that to another person? Especially a woman. And especially a woman as small and delicate as this one.
“How do you know no one took her to a hospital?” Cornell asked.
“Because as soon as I saw the scans, I had my assistant call the Ashton house and talk to the staff. None of them were aware of any trips to the hospital and never saw her in a cast. We also verified that none of the hospitals in Savannah ever listed Mrs. Ashton as a patient. Either she wasn’t treated for
these injuries at all, or she was treated out of town, or possibly seen in a private office by a doctor who didn’t know her history of other injuries. If a doctor only saw her once, for one fracture, he might not have had any reason to suspect domestic violence. But this last time, her abuser went too far, ruptured her spleen, nearly killed her. But that’s still not the worst of it.”
Luke’s head whipped up. “What could possibly be worse?”
“Mrs. Ashton is septic. She’s on IV antibiotics and will be moved from Recovery to Intensive Care soon.”
“Why is she septic?” Luke asked.
“Because she was recently pregnant. I suspect she lost the baby during a beating, and she never had medical treatment. I performed a D & C to scrape out her uterus. If she’s lucky, she’ll respond to the antibiotics.”
“And if she isn’t lucky?” Cornell asked, his notebook out again.
“She could die.”
A nurse came into the room and whispered something to the doctor.
“I have to check on another patient, gentlemen,” the doctor said. “I’ll be back in a few minutes.”
After the doctor left, Cornell flipped his notebook closed.
“I’m keeping Mrs. Ashton at the top of my persons-of-interest list.”
Luke stared at him incredulously. “After what the doctor just said? You’d pursue her as a suspect?”
“Regardless of what her husband did to her, she didn’t have the right to kill him. She should have reported the abuse.”
“It’s not that easy and you know it. I’ve seen enough domestic-violence cases to know people feel trapped, with nowhere to turn. Or they kid themselves into thinking the abuser is sorry, that he’ll change his ways. Or worse, they blame themselves. Getting out isn’t as easy as you would think from the outside looking in.”
“Regardless, she’s a billionaire’s wife,” Cornell said. “She wasn’t exactly hurting for money. She could have left him. She did leave him. She wasn’t trapped.”
Luke ground his teeth together and reached for Caroline’s hand. Her skin was burning up, pale, almost translucent. He couldn’t begin to imagine the pain she’d suffered. Did she even know she was pregnant? Did she know she’d lost a baby?