Perfect Victim by Carla Norton, Christine McGuire Read Free Book Online

the side of the box. This may have kept the inside of the box from becoming even more stifling, but it did nothing to alter the temperature, and Colleen, meanwhile, had to listen to the motor’s constant whine.
    Cameron Hooker was figuring this all out as he went along.
    When it became obvious that Colleen’s weight was plunging, he decided to keep track of it. He’d bring down the scale, put it on the floor of the box and have her stand on it, noting the figures on a piece of paper. One day, she caught sight of the paper: 113 pounds.
    The man’s wife generally stayed away. Once in a while, thinking only she and Cameron were in the basement, Colleen would be startled during her meal to hear Jan’s voice come from the stairs. And one hot afternoon Janice had surprised Colleen with a glass of lemonade, letting Colleen sit up in the box to drink it. But the woman remained more or less invisible, a specter hovering in the background, a disembodied voice that floated in at unexpected moments.
    Colleen was sometimes locked down on the rack, but more often hung, usually by both arms and always naked and blindfolded. She was frequently whipped. On occasion she knew her captor was taking photographs of her: She heard the click of the camera, saw the flash of the lights.
    No matter what else the man did to her, the pain of simply hanging was awful. The leather cuffs bit deeply into her wrists, cutting her skin, hurting those sensitive nerves that run into the body’s most important tools, the hands. But that was only one focal point; the pain pulled down her arms into her back, across her ribs, knotting under her arms. Sometimes she momentarily escaped the pain by blacking out, but when she came to, it was as if it had been saved up, doubled, and it hit with excruciating force.
    Cameron Hooker was well aware that hanging someone by the hands is not only painful but dangerous. The cuffs act as a tourniquet, cutting off the circulation. If one is hung by the wrists more than twenty or thirty minutes, the tissue starts to die and gangrene sets in, requiring amputation or eventually causing death.
    So Hooker was careful not to hang his victim for too long; a corpse would be terribly inconvenient.
    Three months elapsed, and Cameron Hooker finally had to admit that he needed to give his captive a bath. She was filthy.
    She smelled bad. She looked awful.
    So one August evening, after the baby had been put to bed, Cameron got Colleen out of the box and brought her upstairs.
    He walked her through the kitchen, through the dining room, and around to the bathroom, where he filled the tub.
    He tied her hands behind her back. He taped over the blindfold with duct tape, taped her mouth. And he tied her legs to a broomstick. Then he put her face down in the water.
    He held her down, even though her struggles were ineffectual.
    She couldn’t raise herself up because the broomstick, lodged across the tub’s rim, kept her from pulling her knees up under her. He held her head under until she couldn’t hold her breath anymore.
    When the bubbles ceased and she started sucking in water, Hooker pulled her up by the hair, then dunked her again.
    As he dunked her over and over, he took the opportunity to focus his camera, which he’d already loaded with film and had on hand, and take some pictures. Submerged and helpless, Colleen must have seemed an interesting subject; he took several shots, dunking her at least two dozen times before finally stopping.
    When she was finally allowed to sit up and catch her breath, she sucked in air with painful gasps. Her lungs ached strangely.
    Now Cameron enlisted Janice’s aid for the nasty business of doing something about Colleen’s hair. It was tangled, matted and filthy, and the tape left a sticky residue in it. Regular hair conditioner had only a negligible effect, so Janice tried putting vegetable oil on it. She still couldn’t comb the knots out, so she up and got the scissors, snipping out one tangle and