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

then another and finally cutting off about five inches.
    After her bath, Colleen’s blindfold was tightened. Then she was led back downstairs and put in the box, her lungs stil aching. If the ordeal had left her cleaner, it had also underscored the terrifying control her captor had over her. He was all she knew. She existed completely at his whim. And now he had given her life: He hadn’t killed her.

CHAPTER 5
    So complete was Colleen’s isolation from the world above her that she didn’t even notice when the wife left late that summer.
    Janice didn’t know what else to do. The sick drama unfolding in the basement left her terrified at the thought of being found out, and guilt dogged her steps as she went about her daily chores.
    She tried not to think about it, but she felt so sorry for Colleen that she could scarcely put together a plate of sandwiches for her without feeling waves of shame and remorse. Yet her feelings were confused. Along with the despair came pangs of jealousy and resentment.
    Despite her misgivings, Janice hadn’t the courage to completely sever her ties with Cameron. (Hadn’t he told her that if she ever left him, he would track her down and come after her?)
    So, to put some distance between herself and the situation at home, she retreated to the home of the older sister on whom she’d been so dependent as a child.
    Jan found a job with Exatron, an electronics firm in the Silicon Valley. Though she commuted home to Red Bluff on the weekends, she stayed with her sister during the week and had ample opportunity to let slip some hint of what was going on at 1140 Oak Street. She didn’t. She’d learned long ago to deal with frightening and unsavory truths by simply blocking them out. And she was good at keeping secrets.
    So was Cameron. Despite all the time and energy he put into his private obsessions, he kept them hidden, compartmentalized from the rest of his life by doors and locks and silence.
    He made whips and hid them. He stocked up on hardcore pornography and squirreled it away.
    None of the hundreds of slides and photographs he took of Janice and Colleen, for example, were sent out to be developed; he did all the work at home, in his own makeshift darkroom in the basement. He’d even built his own enlarger-nothing fancy, but functional. Sometimes he’d develop film while Colleen was sitting on the rack, eating with her plate in her lap; she could hear him shut off the lights and see the red glow out of the edge of her blindfold. Yet for all any outsiders knew, Cameron Hooker was just a harmless shutterbug, snapping photos at family gatherings.
    Meanwhile, within the secret box in his basement, Colleen Stan was all too intimate with Hooker’s private interests. As the days crawled by, the list of sadistic fantasies he acted out on her lengthened. Once, while he had her hanging by the wrists, he held a heat lamp next to her skin, watching her writhe in pain as it burned. Another time, he touched her with live electrical wires.
    He hung her upside-down and bound her in strange ways. He made her orally copulate him. He strangled her. She was little more than his guinea pig, and he subjected her to just about anything he could imagine and devise, short of technically breaking his promise of fidelity.
    Cameron Hooker remained a mystery to Colleen. She could make no sense of how he treated her; sometimes she was tortured as punishment, sometimes it was apparently just entertainment. And sometimes he was unexpectedly kind to her, like one morning when he brought down some pancakes for her; she ate twice that day. And once or twice he brought down some toast. Yet there seemed to be no connection between her behavior and these benevolent gestures.
    She examined his words for some key to his psyche, but he spoke little and she stayed bewildered. Whenever she asked when he would let her go, he still replied: “Pretty soon.” It was maddening. Months had passed already.
    She despaired…and