The video began with a close-up of a human eye. Dark brown.
Bloodshot. A tear poised on the tip of the eyelash. The smeared mascara told me it was a woman’s eye, and it looked like she’d been crying for a while.
The image lingered there until the tear dropped sadly from her eyelash. Then the video slowly panned backward to reveal the rest of her face. I recognized her immediately from the photo I’d seen on her name badge in her purse. “It’s Cassandra Lillo,” I whispered to Ralph. “Our missing woman.”
After a moment, Cassandra stared up, then down, then from side to side as if she were looking for something.
Another tear fell.
The only audio was the sound of a man’s slow, heavy breathing.
The cameraman.
My heart began to hammer. I didn’t like this. I knew already that this video was not going to have a pleasant ending.
The image continued to widen until Cassandra’s shoulders came into view. I could see that she was standing facing the camera, but where, I couldn’t tell. The background was blurry. She shuddered, and a thin shiver ran through her. There were two dress straps draped across her shoulders.
I felt my heart churning in my chest.
The cameraman’s breathing continued to grow faster. The image widened, and I could see that Cassandra was wearing a crimson evening gown. Maybe silk. It looked expensive. She was terrifyingly beautiful.
And very, very afraid.
Another shiver caught her, held her. Shook her.
The center of the picture reflected a fine glint, and now I saw why. She was standing behind a pane of glass.
I leaned closer. The image widened.
No, not just a pane of glass. Cassandra was in a large tank. If she was five-eleven, the tank was about three meters wide, deep, and tall. Eight pipes, inserted through holes in the glass, formed the top of the tank, the spaces between them providing air for her to breath.
The camera tilted, and the video traveled down her body, down her legs, to show us that she was standing barefoot in a pool of water that reached her knees. Something was around her ankle.
The camera drew in for a close-up, and I saw that her abductor had clamped a shackle around her left ankle. A chain led from the manacle to a rusty ring at the bottom of the tank.
My beating, beating heart.
Cassandra kicked her foot uselessly against the chain. Her ankle was raw from previous kicks, but she didn’t seem to care. Still, only the sound of the cameraman breathing; now faster, though.
She kicked again, harder. His breathing quickened. He was getting excited by what he saw. No sound of Cassandra’s cries. No sound of the splashing water or the chain.
Then, the camera swept up to the top corner of the tank where a gray pipe was spitting out a narrow, but steady, stream of water.
No, no, no.
He’s going to drown her. He’s going to film her as she dies.
I felt a rush of the same cold, terrifying anger that I’d felt thirteen years earlier when I saw what Richard Basque had done to Sylvia Padilla in the slaughterhouse. Anguish and terror flooding through me.
What humans are capable of…
What humans do…
Suddenly, Cassandra closed her hands into tight, desperate fists, squeezed her eyes shut, threw her head back, and screamed-but to us, her blood-curdling terror remained silent, muted, then overlaid with the cameraman’s breathing. Seeing Cassandra standing there screaming at the top of her lungs, and yet making no sound, sent chills down my back. It was more disturbing, more heartbreaking, than if I could have heard her.
My heart slammed against my chest.
She screamed until she was out of air, and then she shrieked soundlessly again as the camera panned to the side to reveal dark red words, the color of blood, scrawled on the gray plaster of a nearby wall: Freedom or Pain?
You decide.
8:00 p.m.
Finally, the camera returned to Cassandra, one last time. She’d crumpled to the floor of the tank and was now sitting tragically in the water. Her hands covered her face. Her shoulders shook as she wept. The water rippled and washed against the glass.
Then, the video dissolved into black, and all we could hear was the sound of the cameraman’s breathing. Until that, too, faded.
And then all was dark and still and silent.
Except for the deafening roar of blood, rushing, pumping, screaming through my heart.