Chapter 27
Pearce put me to bed,and I slept the day away. When I woke up, I was in a panic because I remembered that when I left my house yesterday, I hadn’t bothered to lock my door and my purse was inside.
“I should’ve brought it here yesterday, but I didn’t know where you were at the time,” he said.
Throwing on his running shoes, Pearce was out the door and headed over there to check things out. It was only thirty minutes later, and he was back with an overnight bag, my purse, phone, and keys. Everything had been just fine. He told me he saw the smashed-up TV in the driveway, so he cleaned it up for me, as well as the DVD player in the living room.
When I looked at my cell phone, I saw the eight missed texts from Pearce and just smiled.
“Come over here, please.” He came and sat on the bed. I was still sleepy, but he assured me I’d be better the next day. “Thanks for taking such good care of me.” I kissed him and just let him hold me.
“Are you hungry?”
“You know what I want?”
“What, sweetheart?”
“Chicken soup from Omie’s.”
“You got it.”
I sank into the soft bed and wrapped his pillow around me to have his scent near me. Oh lordy did I ever love that man.
* * *
On Sunday,Pearce, John, and I sat around and strategized the damage control. John was convinced we had our guy. The police had his name and address, and they were waiting on the search warrant. The video worked in our favor. After it came through, they told us that without it, the judge wouldn’t have signed the warrant.
I called in sick on Monday. They were planning to search his house today. They wanted me protected, just in case something didn’t go right, because they were hoping to get all the accomplices too.
Thank God for Phil. The Xanax was making this all bearable. I was no longer shaking like a leaf in a hurricane, but one at the beach on a breezy day instead. I was beginning to worry about my weight too. If I didn’t start eating soon, my wedding dress was going to hang on me. Pearce brought home a variety of Ben and Jerry’s for me to nibble on whenever the urge struck.
Henry and Susan came by to check on us. They apologized and told us they wanted us to be together no matter what. If Pearce was happy, they were happy. I was too stressed out to get excited, but I promised we’d talk about it later.
When the time arrived that the search took place, I could barely breathe because of the ten-ton monster sitting on my chest. I’d never felt this way before and didn’t want to again. Every little noise, creak, shadow, freaked me out. This was no way to live.
My nails had gone from long and pretty to short and jagged in a matter of two days. My teeth had gnawed them down to the quick and it was weird because I’d never been one to bite my nails before. Pearce was constantly tugging my hands out of my mouth.
“Honey, I don’t care about the state of your nails. I just don’t want you to get sick before the wedding.”
Ever the doctor, he worried about germs.
Pearce tried every kind of distraction he could conjure up. When he’d suggested watching a movie, we both broke down, first laughing like crazy because his TV was smashed up, but then I started crying all over again. The stress had reached its boiling point with me.
“Go ahead and cry, scream, throw things if you want, but I can’t stand to see you this torn up, Lex. It’s going to be fine. You have the best team of attorneys and I promise they’re going to get this guy,” he swore to me.
He asked if I wanted to lie down, and I said no. Even though snuggling with him was where I felt the safest, I had to find the strength to plow ahead. I couldn’t keep taking to the bed every time something upset me.
It wasn’t until late in the afternoon when we got the call. John wanted us to go down to the police department.
Pearce looked at me and wondered if I was willing to go.
“Hell yes,” I said. “That fucker has taken up too much space in my head as it is.”
He smiled crookedly and we headed out the door. The Charleston PD was only a few minutes away and John met us at the entrance. The huge grin he sported told me the news was positive.
“We got him, Alexia. Follow me.”
He took us to a small conference-styled room, and a few minutes later, three detectives came in. One of them I had met a year ago when he interrogated me in the hospital. He looked at me awkwardly and said, “Ms. Hammond, thanks for coming in. We owe you for this. I’d also like to apologize for my behavior last year while you were in the hospital. I’m sorry.”
I waved a hand through the air. “That’s old news,” I responded. I wanted to get this show on the road. “Tell me what’s going on.” I shot straight to the point. I wasn’t in the mood for chitchat right now.
“The suspect has been apprehended, along with five accomplices. His name is Daniel Simpson, and he’ll be charged with multiple counts. In your case alone, he and his cohorts will be charged with aggravated assault and battery with the intent to kill, kidnapping, computer crime, cyber bullying, extortion, harassment, intent to rape, sexual assault, stalking, and conspiracy to commit all of the above. The other thing I might mention is he is also being charged with the murder of Ms. Melanie Gordon. We found videos of her on his computer, and she’s been missing since around the time of your attack last year.”
“Jesus,” was all Pearce could say. Then I was in his arms, laughing and crying all at once. Relieved but thinking that it could’ve been me. I don’t know who came into the room the night I was tied up and fighting for my life, but whoever it was, stopped those fuckers. I didn’t end up dead like Melanie, but I think Daniel Simpson would have kept coming after me because I was the one who got away.
I turned away from Pearce and asked the detective, because the question had been bugging me forever. Who knew if he had an answer, but I had to ask anyway. “Why me, Detective? Why did he do all of this?”
“Ms. Hammond, we don’t have all the answers yet, but we think he was drugging the girls. We know that coke and other drugs were involved, but we think he was slipping something into their drinks, like Rohypnol, GHB, or ketamine.”
Pearce piped in and said, “Jesus. Those are all date rape drugs.”
“That’s correct. We also think it was part of some type of sex video ring he had going. For some reason, Ms. Hammond, you woke up before Simpson did, and they weren’t expecting that. You ruined their plans. We think that he would film these girls while they were drugged and then they wouldn’t remember anything. The videos would go up for sale on the black market and the girls would never know. What we don’t know yet is where Ms. Gordon’s death fits into all of this, and how your abduction is a part of this. We know Simpson is involved and we’ll get to the bottom of it, we can promise you that.”
“But what about those other people I heard when they held me?”
The detective looked at us and said, “Right now, we still don’t know. We’re hoping that we’ll be able to get Simpson to break down and talk. We have enough evidence to lock him away for a long, long time. We’ll use that to try to persuade him to turn his cohorts in. We’ll be in touch with Mr. Remington as we get more information. One last thing though. Are you up to identifying him? We can put him in a lineup or you can look at his mug shot.”
“Absolutely I can.”
He pulled out a binder filled with photos and showed me a page of mug shots. I checked them out, but my eyes instantly went to him. I pointed to the picture and said, “That’s definitely him.” I remembered him clearly from that day on the bridge too.
Pearce rubbed his chin for a moment and asked, “I’m curious about something. If Alexia was drugged, then how could she have ...” He looked at me with a dark look, and then pulled me tightly to him, like he was afraid I’d bolt out the door or something. “If she was drugged, how was she able to perform like she did in the video?”
“Because it wasn’t her. We’re fairly positive the video was a hoax to get back at her because everything this creep tried to do to her backfired. Most likely he hired some girl and made her up to look like Ms. Hammond. It was an act. I’m not saying they didn’t actually do anything because they certainly did, but it wasn’t Ms. Hammond. If you’d taken the time to analyze it, which I’m sure neither of you did and I don’t blame you, you would’ve noticed how blurred everything was. That was intentional. All the other videos on this guy’s computer were crystal clear. This one was edited to appear that way.”
The only thing I wanted to do right now was yell and scream and I did just that. “Oh my God, it wasn’t me!” A two-ton elephant had been lifted off my chest.
Pearce laughed and so did John. The detectives smiled. I don’t think they had any idea of what I’d been through the last two days.
“Are we free to go?” Pearce asked.
“Free as a bird,” John said. “Alexia, we may need you to testify at the trial. Is that okay?”
I just laughed. “As long as it doesn’t interfere with my wedding or honeymoon. Let’s get out of here,” I said as I grabbed Pearce’s arm.
As we left the station, a memory of how sick I felt that following morning hit. I told Pearce and he said, “No doubt with all that crap in your system.”
“At the time, I couldn’t figure it out.”
“So now you know.”
There was only one place I wanted to go, and I told him so. “No detours, stops, nothing. Straight there and I don’t care if we stay there till next week.”
He just grinned. “I’m glad my girl’s back.”
“Me too.”
* * *
John Remington calledus five days later and asked to meet him at the police station again. Pearce and I immediately went and sat down with John and the three detectives. What they told us made every single hair on my body stand on end. Daniel Simpson confessed in exchange for a life sentence versus the possibility of the death penalty, which South Carolina had. Melanie Gordon was the fourth woman he had killed. One of his schemes consisted of abducting the women, drugging and then filming them while they were being gang-raped. Apparently, Melanie and three others had fought so hard after the drugs wore off, he decided they deserved to die. He had intended to do that to me, only he’d told too many people and one of the men had brought in several of their buddies to break up the party. Daniel’s big mouth ended up saving my life. None of the men knew he had killed any of those women. They just thought it was a night of drunkenness followed by a gang rape. Like that made it okay or something. Anyway, the men who broke up the little party the night I was there, saved my life. I couldn’t believe how close I had come to becoming a murder statistic. The other thing that was so sick was there was actually a market for videos of women getting gang-raped. Some of the women in those videos were so drugged they didn’t know what was happening to them. Such a tragedy. The other part of Daniel’s scheme was to pick up women at bars and bring them home to video them. Sometimes they would be out of it, nearly unconscious, they weren’t aware of what was happening, but other times they were willing participants. This had been going on for several years, the officers said, by the numbers of videos they had found.
When Pearce and I left the station, we were both terribly shaken about what they’d told us. During the past few months, we’d suspected Simpson might have been harassing me, but this was beyond anything either of us ever could’ve imagined. We clung to each other for the longest time, thanking God that nothing had come of it.