Perfect Victim (11 page)

He was willing to concede this small point. He said, “I know, that’s God’s.” But he continued to wait expectantly for her to sign.

In tears and trembling, she disguised her signature; with a wavering hand she inked her name on the line designated “Forever Slave.” As a witness, Janice signed “Janet Powers.”

The groundwork had been laid. Cameron had convinced Colleen the Company was real, and now it was just a question of strengthening that belief. He told her the Company required that she wear a slave collar as identification, and of course he had prepared one: a tight-fitting collar made of a stretchy, gold metallic material that joined with a gold leaf. He fastened it around her neck and she felt it constrict and itch against her skin.

It was costing him fifteen hundred dollars to register her with the Company, he said. Now that she was signed in, he would be able to let her out to do things for him because the Company would back him up. They would provide security — watching the house, monitoring the phones. And if she ever tried to run away, they would catch her and torture her so mercilessly that she would be lucky if she survived. In graphic detail, he described how runaways were punished by having their hands nailed to a beam from which they were left to hang for days.

Intensifying Colleen’s horror, Cameron launched into a story about Jan. She had also been a slave, he said, but she’d tried to escape. She was hitchhiking to freedom when a policeman spotted her and picked her up. She thought she was safe, but the policeman was actually a member of the Company and knew she was a runaway. He took her back to her owners, who nailed her up by the hands as punishment. She hung for about three days, then went into convulsions and had to be taken down. But her punishment wasn’t over — she was put on a rack and her legs were twisted, permanently damaging her knees and hips.

(Colleen had noticed the brace and bandage on Janice’s leg. Janice did have knee problems; she’d just gotten out of the hospital after knee surgery. But that wasn’t part of the story Cameron told his slave.)

After that, he continued, Jan had to go back to work for her owners. They ran a place in L.A. called Rent-a-Dungeon, a den of prostitution for members of the Company where any member could pay a fee, pick a girl, and take her to a dungeon where he could torture her however he liked. If he accidentally killed the girl, he would have to pay a fine of $ 10,000 or more.

On a visit to this particular establishment, Cameron had noticed Jan, who was just fifteen. After her escape attempt she was made to wear a cross, an indication that she had been marked for death. Cameron felt sorry for her. To save her life, he bought her and married her. Since then, he said, he’d had surgery done on her hands to remove the scars left by the nails.

it was melodramatic stuff, but Hooker told it with conviction and Colleen bought it all.

Over the next days and weeks Cameron embellished his stories about slaves and the Company, polishing details and wiping out any skepticism that might be lurking in Colleen’s subconscious.

He even gave her a slave name. After a lot of thought, he’d decided on “K,” he said. Just the letter. He’d considered “D” and “B” but decided they were too common, so from now on his slave would be known simply as K.

Colleen was all too susceptible to this sudden onslaught of detail. Having endured an almost unfathomable stretch of sensory deprivation, her brain was starved for information. And now the man who had total control over her life, whose power bordered on omnipotence, was finally explaining how the whole puzzle fit together.

She must have felt dazed by the awful illumination of it. All the horrors clicked into place — how such a terrible fate could befall her, how this evil man could possibly get away with what he was doing. There was an entire underground organization, almost a cult of men who preyed on young women like herself.

The Company. There was a frightening logic to it all, and at last she had a way of comprehending how she could be held hostage to this nightmare.

Now it was clear-cut and in black and white. She was the slave. He was the master. And that relationship was as fixed as the seal on the slavery contract.

She was no longer Colleen Stan, but simply K. A servant. Property. A skinny, sad twenty-one-year-old with long dirty hair and a slave collar around her neck.

Having signed the slavery contract, she must strictly obey its dictates. She must always address Cameron as “Sir” or “Master,” and always address Jan as “Ma’am.” She must never look her master in the face. She must never cross her legs or wear underwear.

She must kneel before her master to ask a question, and must ask permission before doing anything.

If she tried to contact her family, Hooker warned, the Company would retaliate with five days of crucifixion for her, and death for any family member she contacted.

With those rules established, K was allowed to come up out of the basement.

At night, with the draperies drawn and no company expected, K was brought upstairs to work. They gave orders, and unless she didn’t understand, she obeyed without comment. She wasn’t allowed to talk except to ask instructions. (Cameron mined the idea of any contact between the two women with fear; he told K that if Jan were displeased, she would kill her.)

K’s chores were simple, mostly cooking, washing dishes, and cleaning up — drudgery, but nonetheless an improvement over the timeless claustrophobia of the basement. And now K was afforded a few small amenities, such as limited access to the bathroom, though she had to kneel and ask permission first.

To discipline her more strictly, Cameron contrived the “attention drill.” Whenever he shouted “Attention!” K had to strip off her clothes, stand on her tiptoes, and reach her hands up to the top of the arched doorway between the living room and dining room. She must stand there, tensed and naked except for the slave collar, until he told her she could relax. He wanted to impress on her that the slavery contract wasn’t just a sheet of paper, that it represented a whole new way of life: total subjugation.

Though her world had more than doubled in size, it was still limited to small spaces of cement and linoleum and wood. The stairs became familiar, but she was continually locked in cramped enclosures, in darkness and in silence. Her environment hadn’t changed greatly, but the climate of her thoughts had been disrupted, her identity profoundly altered, her perception of reality twisted.

Now her waking hours were menaced by an unknown and sinister presence: the Company.

A couple of weeks after she’d signed the contract, Cameron came down into the basement and let her out for her plate of leftovers, as usual. Then he casually remarked, “Oh, I got this from the Company today.” He handed K a typed card, nothing fancy, sealed in plastic. A registration card. Short and businesslike, it simply acknowledged receipt of fifteen hundred dollars for the registration of Colleen Stan as the slave of Michael Powers. K looked at it and gave it back to him; he put it back on top of the workshop, where she supposed it was kept.

The card had taken little time to prepare, and this minor incident took only moments, but it was effective. The image of the card took root in K’s subconscious — another proof of the Company, another link in the chain of lies that Cameron so steadily fashioned. Link after link, he invented details about the Company, welding it all with truth.

In K’s mind the Company loomed as a large, efficient secret network. They had bugged the house. They were monitoring the phone. Like Big Brother in Orwell’s 1984, the Company hovered always in the background, an imperceptible but constant threat.

Its members could be men anywhere, its victims were women who let down their guards even for a moment. K feared the Company even more than the master at whose hand she’d suffered so much pain.

Hooker played on this fear. He told her that he and his brother had been raised around the slave-trading business, that he’d earned extra cash by tracking down runaways, building up his Company account. His father and brother were no longer active within the Company, but he warned that if they knew he had a slave they might want to “borrow” her for “parties.”

He told her, too, the story of a runaway who’d made a grave mistake: She’d written an article about her ordeal. It took three months for the Company to track her down. By then, they’d devised a special punishment.

First, they pulled off her fingers, one at a time. Then her toes. A member who was a surgeon was called in to remove her arms and legs — without an anesthetic. Still alive, she had her tongue cut out and her hearing destroyed. They blinded her with a soldering gun. Yet she lived. Finally, they hung her from her braided hair on a hook next to her master’s bed.

And so K learned there were worse things than being a slave to Cameron Hooker — especially if she ran away and told anyone about the Company. Cameron made sure she understood that.

The Hookers were astonishingly successful at concealing the peculiar circumstances of their household from intruders. But they failed to perceive that the real danger to their weird status quo came not from outsiders, but from within.

Janice — scared, intimidated, and barely twenty years old — found the whole situation unnerving. She apparently felt lost, overwhelmed, but Cameron was her husband, the father of her child, shouldn’t she do what he told her? If she loved her husband, that was the most important thing, wasn’t it?

The problem was that with this new woman around the house, Janice felt doubtful of Cameron’s love for her. And so she decided to test him.

The agreement had been that there would be no sex between Cameron and his slave. This was still technically true — and Jan believed it — but she was worried. So early one morning, while she and her husband were still in bed, she asked him a question to see what his response would be. She asked if he wanted to brin K upstairs and have sex with her.

She soon regretted asking.

Cameron went down to the basement, got K out of the box, and brought her upstairs — naked, afraid, and with no idea what was about to happen. He put the leather cuffs on her wrists, secured the blindfold around her head with tape, and gagged her.

Then he placed her on the bed and proceeded to stake her out, tying her wrists to eyehooks in the headboard, tying her feet to the bottom comers of the bed. K didn’t even realize that Jan was in the room until the couple got on the bed with her.

Cameron lay between the two women, kissing and touching both of them. Then he mounted K.

This was too much for Janice. She got up, rushed crying to the bathroom, and got sick. K could hear her retching while Cameron raped her.

Jan put on her clothes and was starting to leave when Cameron got up and stopped her. He calmed her down, talked her out of leaving, and put K back in the box in the basement.

It was a brief episode, but it marked a shift, a further tilting of the relationships in that already bizarre household. Cameron had crossed over a line, broken a mental barrier. K had fallen to another level of degradation. And Janice, whose illness may have been caused as much by morning sickness as by the scene unfolding in her bedroom, had her faith in her husband shaken.

No immediate consequences arose, and life went on much as before. But there was no going back.

One morning, rather than putting K back in the box, Cameron left her to sleep in the workshop. This was strange in itself, but then there was some sporadic commotion upstairs and an unusual racket — a pounding and clatter — in the basement.

K was kept in the workshop for about forty-eight hours. The second night she wasn’t even let out to eat. Dinner time came and went, her stomach rumbled, but nothing was brought down.

Eventually she forgot she was hungry.

It was much later, about 3:00 A.M., when Hooker finally let her out. He handcuffed and blindfolded her, led her upstairs, through the kitchen, and out the back door. For the first time in nearly a year, K was out of the house.

Jan was already waiting in the pickup with baby Cathy.

Cameron hurried K over to Jan’s side, maneuvered her into the cab, and had her sit with her head down in Jan’s lap so that she couldn’t be seen.

The doors were shut, the engine started, and the pickup drove out of the alley and back onto the street. With this same cast of characters, with K handcuffed and blindfolded and the pickup heading out Oak Street, it was almost the kidnap in reverse.

The streets were nearly deserted as they sped south on Main Street and out old Highway 99.

It was a short trip, about five miles, then the pickup turned down a bumpy road, gravel crunching briefly beneath the tires before it came to a halt. K was taken out of the cab into the cool night air, then led up some steps, in a door, and to the right.

Here her blindfold and handcuffs were removed.

She was in a bedroom. Before her stood a large waterbed, its headboard and sides upholstered in black, the whole frame raised on a high, wooden pedestal. Cameron gestured toward a hole at its base, an entrance to a space beneath the bed, and said, “This is where you’re going to be staying.”

The Hookers had bought an acre of land out beyond the city limits in a sparsely populated stretch of neglected property, some of it pasture, some of it just there, all of it now turned to emerald and dotted with spring wildflowers.

Their yellow and brown single-wide trailer stood apart, as they wanted, at the very end of a dirt-and-gravel lane just off Pershing Road. They had a few neighbors, but no immediate ones. And not far behind them, to the west, ran Interstate 5, the distant freeway noise competing in the air with the constant calling and chatter of birds.

It was a good move for them, rural but not too remote, with the big sky overhead and lots of room for a garden. And it was theirs, they wouldn’t have to worry about bothersome landlords popping in to remind them to mow the lawn or water the roses.

They were glad for their new privacy and glad to leave the little house on Oak Street. That place had worried them, with the Leddys living just next door and the house perched so close to sidewalk traffic. And so they’d decided on a safer, more secluded residence.