Monday Mourning

“Very effective, you sick bastard.” My voice rang bitter in the empty room. “Force one prisoner to film while you torture another.”

I tried watching more footage, but couldn’t sit still. Like a toddler on a Twinkie high, I kept bounding up, checking my office phone, scanning the corridor.

After twenty minutes I returned to my office, nearly nauseous with anger and anxiety.

I began an article on the Stockholm syndrome, but unbidden images sucked my focus from the page.

Anique Pomerleau scurrying past Neal Catts’s parlor.

I thought about them, sealed in claustrophobic blackness, petrified, naked, alone. Cameron Hooker had hung and stretched Colleen Stan, whipped her, shocked her with electric wires until her skin blistered. Neal Catts had controlled his victims in identical ways, using sensory deprivation, terror, and pain to break them.

I tried to imagine the ordeal these women had endured. Had they lain in the dark listening to the sound of their own breathing? To the hammering of their own hearts? Had they known day from night? Had they felt terror at each rattling of the lock? Had they abandoned hope? Had memories of their former lives slipped from them with time, like fog slowly evaporating into morning air?

Something hardened inside me.

As with the tapes, I began taking notes while reading.

Bondage. Magnification of sexual tension by physical restriction of movement.

Sadomasochism. Generation of sexual excitement by giving and/or receiving pain. In the pathological extreme, kidnapping, imprisonment, imposition of involuntary servitude.

The Stockholm syndrome.

I began an outline of the process, adding points as I moved from article to article.

One. Abduction followed by isolation. Victim confined, stripped, humiliated, degraded.

Two. Use of physical and or sexual abuse. Victim made to feel vulnerable.

Three. Removal of normal daylight patterns.

Four. Destruction of privacy. Defecation, urination, menstruation controlled or observed by captor.

Five. Control and reduction of food and water. Development of dependency on the captor.

Ryan called at three. They’d searched every inch of the hospital. The women were not there.

I returned to my research.

Six. Imposition of unpredictable punishment. Victim denied explanation or rationale.