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?
“In the waiting room,” Luke said, “you agreed she couldn’t have killed him.”
Cornell’s gaze flicked to where Luke held Caroline’s hand. “I agreed she couldn’t have shot him. But that doesn’t mean that she doesn’t know who did. Her husband was a billionaire. That gives me a billion reasons she might be involved in his death somehow. And the evidence the doctor just showed us is pretty convincing. What better motive to kill her husband than because he’d abused her and caused her to miscarry?”
His argument was sound. But Caroline had come to Luke asking for his help, and here she was in a hospital bed fighting for her life. She needed someone else to fight for her now. Since no one else was volunteering for the job, that someone might as well be him.
“Do you even know if she’ll inherit?” he asked. “If not, that blows your billion-reason theory away.”
“Not yet. I called the husband’s law firm. His lawyer is going to send me a copy of the will.” The detective looked at Luke’s hand on Caroline’s again. “Tell me, Mr. Dawson. With her resources, how hard do you think it would be for Mrs. Ashton to hire someone to kill her husband?”
Luke wanted to deny the possibility but couldn’t. What Cornell said made sense. If Caroline had finally decided enough was enough, she had all the resources to make it happen.
Chapter Four
Luke shifted in his chair, bracing his forearms on his knees as he watched the doctor and nurses on the other side of Caroline’s hospital room. She’d responded well to the antibiotics and was already out of the Intensive Care Unit. Now the doctor was lightening her sedation to bring her out of her deep, healing sleep. For the first time since the discovery of Richard Ashton’s body, Luke was going to be able to talk to Caroline. He looked forward to seeing her open her eyes, but he also dreaded the pain she might suffer if she hadn’t known about the baby.
All but one of the nurses left the room. The remaining nurse sat in a chair beside the bed. The doctor spoke to her in low tones before approaching Luke.
“It won’t be