The familiar sound of a doorbell met Xavier’s ears as he groggily opened his eyes. The realization that he was lying down on the couch back in his own apartment caused him to sit bolt upright. He had just put his feet on the floor when the front door opened and in walked his daughter.
“Cam!” he said, jumping up and covering the space between them in two quick strides. “Thank God you’re alive,” he said as he embraced her
“Of course I’m alive,” she said with a laugh. “It’s good to see you, too, Dad.” She briefly hugged him, then gently pushed back from his embrace. “But I can’t stay long, I have class. Here’s the briefcase you asked for.”
She held out a small satchel, which Xavier took from her instinctively. He’d never seen it before. He was about to say as much when Cam continued.
“I found it right where you said in your text. I can’t believe I hadn’t noticed it before. I guess with all the filming equipment around, I must have missed it.”
“Filming equipment?”
“Yeah. The indie film I have a lead role in, remember? I mentioned it to you in a text last week while you were away having fun with your new girlfriend,” she said, smiling playfully. “Anyway, it’s a low-budget deal, and they said my apartment would be a great location, so they filmed it there. Oh—and the next time you decide to go on a fling like this, you should probably tell your chief of staff in person. He called me asking me if you were okay after he got that short note you left him and you didn’t return his calls.”
She was talking a hundred miles an hour, the way she always did when she was in a hurry.
“So that’s how they did it,” Xavier said under his breath. His mind was reeling from the rush of new revelations, trying to fit them all together like so many pieces of a jig-saw puzzle.
“Are you okay, Dad? You look a bit, I don’t know, confused.”
“I’m fine, really. It’s good to see you,” he said as he regained his composure.
“Hey,” Cam continued, “let’s have lunch today at Thai Heaven. Is one p.m. good for you? I want to know everything about the last six weeks.”
“I’d like that. One p.m. is fine.”
“Great. Gotta go!”
She turned and walked briskly towards the door. “Love you!” she said without turning around. As she closed the door, Xavier continued staring after her, jaw gaping, holding a briefcase he had never seen before.
He stood still for several seconds, feeling the urge to run after her, to hug her again, hear her voice. He took a step towards the door when the vibrating phone in his pocket brought him out of the trance.
Open the briefcase.
The number on the text wasn’t familiar. He shoved the phone back into his pocket and sat down on the couch to examine the contents of the briefcase. There was a single manila envelope inside with the words “READ THIS” emblazoned in red across the front of it.
He bent back the metal clasp and pulled out a stack of papers. It began as a transcript of a text-message conversation between him and Shareese that took place when he had invited her to the Fourth of July party. The exchange was somewhat formal, nice, but not overly friendly. Then he read a message from Shareese that he hadn’t seen before. It was dated July 5th.
I had a GREAT time last night. I can still feel your skin next to mine. Can’t wait to see you again.
A rosy-cheeked emoticon was at the end of the line followed by another blowing a kiss. What followed was a message – supposedly from himself – that set up a romantic rendezvous for the two of them. From that point on, a frequent exchange of passionate texts continued back and forth between Shareese and the person masquerading as him, which had continued until last night. Mixed in were a handful of pictures of Shareese blowing him a kiss, giving him a provocative wink, a playful frown when they supposedly wouldn’t be able to meet one night.
He grabbed his phone and quickly found the exchange, scrolling through it once more and letting the implications of what he was reading sink in. Shareese had kidnapped him, constructing an elaborate scheme which forced him to walk in her own mother’s shoes, fearing for his and his daughter’s life just like Jacquelyn Tyrell had probably feared for her own life and the life of her daughter. And to top it all off, she had created a cover story that would make it virtually impossible for him to prove any of it had ever taken place.
Along with the completely justified anger he felt, there was a begrudging sense of admiration for what Shareese had accomplished, mixed with something else… empathy. He had walked alongside Chantrel Jones these past weeks, feeling the fear along with her, and vicariously experiencing the consequences of her inability to protect herself from a much larger and stronger aggressor. Then he had experienced the emotional evisceration of seeing his own daughter die in front of his eyes and the powerlessness of not being able to do anything to stop it.
Suddenly the supposedly reasonable and enlightened beliefs that had so logically supported one view of the gun issue now weren’t so clear. It was a more complicated world that Shareese Tyrell had introduced him to.
The pages that followed contained compromising pictures of him and Shareese in bed together, with the sheets barely covering their obviously naked bodies. Those must have been taken that first night after he was drugged and taken to wherever they had kept him during his captivity. A warning followed that if he attempted to get the authorities to investigate his experience in any way, the transcript and photos would be released to the press. The last line warned that there was also a stolen gun with his prints on it somewhere that could be used to help cause trouble for him if the affair with an intern half his age didn’t end his career all by itself.
He took his phone out and pulled up the text message that Cam had referred to earlier. He scrolled through six weeks’ worth of messages that he had supposedly exchanged with her. There was a message from him telling Cam about his new love interest, further down he read where she told him about the film she was in. It was all there.
Shareese had been thorough. He was surprised that he didn’t feel as outraged as he probably should considering he had been kidnapped and held against his will for six weeks. But what kept bubbling to the surface of his mind was the fact that his daughter was alive, and the joy he was experiencing from that fact eclipsed every other emotion.
He looked down at his watch – it was 10 a.m. After putting on a pot of coffee he went to shave and take a shower. For the first time he noticed that his beard was gone. Another detail taken care of by Shareese and company to make it seem like his abduction was nothing more than a vacation. His mind was awash with conflicting emotions, trying to process the ordeal he had just been through. How was he going to break the truth about his six-week absence to his daughter?
As he got ready, the images of Chantrel Jones’ battered face, Shareese Tyrell’s family photo, and Shareese’s own tear-stained face kept running through his mind. He wanted to explain away the guilt he was feeling, to reason that he wasn’t partially to blame for the pain and suffering these women and their daughters had endured, but he knew in his heart that he was. He had succeeded in removing guns from the equation, and instead of preventing violence, he had actually succeeded in enabling the abuse to continue in these two cases. It was obvious that whatever the solution was to the gun violence issue, he hadn’t gotten it right yet.
How do we do it? How do we keep violent people who want to hurt others from doing it without putting innocent people at risk in the process?
It was a complicated issue, and he wasn’t sure exactly how yet, but Senator Xavier Sanford was determined to help solve this problem.
Turn to the next page for a sample chapter from Murder at Rendsburg Resort.