Perfect Victim (12 page)

Moving had been a chore, but Cameron had thrown himself into it with characteristic vigor. He’d built the waterbed himself, including the elaborate pedestal. He figured there was no place to keep a slave out at the trailer except under the bed. So he’d measured and sawed, keeping K locked in the workshop while he cut the box down and shortened it to fit neatly into the waterbed’s plywood base. Then he loaded the whole thing into the pickup, drove over to the trailer and assembled it. It had to be ready when they moved K.

The first she knew of the new box was when he told her to get in. She had to enter from the end of the bed, crawling in on her hands and knees. Once she was inside, Cameron placed a board across the opening and bolted it shut. This he covered with a panel that he’d cut specially. It fit tightly into place, disguising the opening. Finally, he pushed some steps up against the foot of the bed. Anyone entering the room couldn’t help but notice this large, impressive waterbed, with its black vinyl edging; no one would guess a human being was imprisoned underneath.

K found this box not so different from the one she’d already spent so many months in, though it was smaller, more confining, even more coffinlike. And it smelled of sawdust from its recent alteration. The green plastic bedpan was there, and she found her sleeping bag spread across the floor, but the “blower” or hair dryer that had been set up outside the box on Oak Street was now inside the box with her, just inches from her head. A couple of airholes had been cut in the bottom of the box, and K soon discovered that she could look out and see a tiny spot of the world outside — not much, but enough to tell if it was day or night. And when people walked through the mobile home the floor vibrated, signaling her of traffic she couldn’t see.

Other than these small changes, she was encased in the same soporific blackness, the same endless night. And though the address had changed, K’s routine hadn’t. She was still let out for just an hour or so a day, in the evenings, to eat, brush her teeth, use the bathroom, clean out the bedpan, and help with chores. About every two weeks she was allowed to shower and wash her hair.

Usually Janice prepared her meal — still leftovers or sandwiches or something simple — which Cameron brought to her. She ate in the bathroom and sometimes worked on macrame projects there, staying out of the box for longer periods. In a sense, the bathroom had replaced the workshop that Cameron had disassembled. (He hadn’t left much evidence of K’s captivity at the Oak Street house, even going back to sweep out the basement to make sure the next tenants would find nothing unusual. But the cement base of the workshop was too heavy to carry upstairs; it had to stay behind — an inscrutable triangular object that may have invited questions, but offered no answers.)

As the Hookers and their slave settled into their new quarters, May 19, 1978, came and went, quietly marking the passing of a year since Colleen Stan’s abduction. Then the hot summer months took hold, and day after day the temperature in Red Bluff zoomed past 100 degrees…105…110…115. The mobile home broiled beneath the sizzling California sky. A swamp cooler chilled the air in the kitchen and living room where little Cathy and Janice, now noticeably pregnant, spent most of their time, but the bedroom door stayed shut. No cool air relieved the heat in the room where K lay locked in her stuffy, tiny space. She was left to swelter in a box turned to an oven.

On Cameron’s day off he would take K out of the box and put her to work in the yard — filling in ditches, cleaning pipes, hoeing weeds. Before getting K out of the box he always had Jan find something for her to wear; she had long ago abandoned the long nightgown as too hot, and he certainly couldn’t have her working out in the yard without clothes.

K didn’t mind the hard work; at least she was out of the box. But one day Cameron took her out behind the trailer and gave her a job that terrified her. He handed her a shovel and told her to dig a hole, the dimensions of which were ominously rectangular.

He offered no explanation, and as she scooped up the dirt, shovelful after shovelful, she couldn’t shake the horrifying notion that she was digging her own grave.

But when the hole was finished K was not Assaulted with bullets or poison. Rather, to her great relief, she was told to bury a large, heavy plank-a railroad tie. The significance of this escaped her, but Cameron apparently knew what he was doing, for he laid a cement foundation just where it had been buried. And then he started construction.

They needed some sort of outbuilding for storage, and Hooker could use some extra space for pursuing his hobbies, so, ever-industrious, he set about building a shed in the backyard. It wasn’t a large shed — nowhere near the size of a garage, not even as roomy as that little basement on Oak Street — but it was big enough.

And when it was done, Cameron decided to try it out.

He came up with some old clothes for K, got her dressed for the walk outside, and took her out to his latest construction.

Once inside, he ordered her to get undressed again, then hung her up by the wrists. That familiar, mean pain shot down her arms and across her back.

Since the move she’d spent most of her time in the box and was no longer used to being hung; the pain hit with fresh intensity.

She struggled and thrashed the air with her legs.

Cameron was provoked, but it wasn’t until the next week that he gave vent to his anger.

He got K out of the box as he had before and took her out to the shed. Jan was with him this time. He gagged K and then put a cloth over her eyes, taping it about her head. He put the leather cuffs on her wrists, stood her on a bucket, and hooked the cuffs to the rafters. To inhibit her movement, he tied her ankles to a stick, and then kicked the bucket out from under her.

In pain, K swung her legs and made plaintive noises in her throat. Cameron scolded her, telling her to be still. “If you’d done it right the first time, you wouldn’t have to go through all this,” he said. But she continued to fling her legs about, searching for something to lift her weight and ease the strain on her arms.

Then, by the worst luck, she accidentally kicked Jan in the stomach. Cameron was furious that his misbehaving slave had kicked his pregnant wife. She would pay for this. He bolted from the shed and rushed to the house.

Since she was blindfolded, K scarcely realized what she’d done, but she knew she was in trouble.

Cameron returned with a whip. He ordered her to “just hang there and behave!” and lashed at her with the whip. The leather whisked through the air and bit into her, wrapping around her like a snake, leaving a trail of hot, red welts.

K tried to block out the pain and be still. In time, the whipping finally stopped. She hung there, sweating, trying to will herself to be calm, but the unrelenting pain down her arms and sides seemed unbearable. Almost involuntarily, she started kicking her legs again, trying to find something to brace herself on.

Cameron saw this as blatant disobedience. To stop her from kicking, he grabbed her legs and tied them to something heavy — an engine, K thought. Still, she struggled and groaned, her pain only provoking more anger. Cameron decided his unruly slave needed more severe punishment and again he rushed out of the shed to the trailer.

K sensed that Jan remained in the shed with her, though her pregnant mistress said nothing.

In a moment he returned. The door opened and shut. And she heard the first match strike.

K could see a tiny fraction out of the bottom of the blindfold, and she saw the flame as it came close to her breast, watching as it seared her skin. At first she wailed in pain. But then, as he kept burning her, telling her to shut up, striking match after match, burning one breast and then the other, it was almost as if someone else was being burnt. She distanced herself from it, watching the flames flicker next to her nipples, feeling nothing.

She didn’t even flinch.

It was a subtle act of courage, even of defiance.

At some point K had decided she wouldn’t cry in front of Cameron Hooker. He could hang her up, whip her, torture her, but she would withhold her tears. Only when she was alone would she finally weep. In the box. In private. Whatever sadistic pleasure Hooker derived from hurting her, he wouldn’t get the satisfaction of seeing her cry. In that if nothing else, she had complete control.

The slave collar around K’s neck tarnished, turning her neck green, and began to deteriorate. According to Hooker, the Company required that every slave wear a collar for identification, so late in the summer he replaced the old collar with something new.

As usual, he offered no explanation of what he was doing.

He first put aluminum foil around her neck. Curious. Then he encircled her neck with a thin rod of stainless steel. When he soldered the ends of the steel rod together to make a ring, it became clear that the purpose of the foil was to deflect heat.

K found this collar looser than the first, more comfortable.

And Cameron also found it satisfactory: It was permanent.

Whether soldering steel, building sheds, fashioning head boxes or laying cement, Cameron Hooker proved himself a remarkably handy, self-reliant, and motivated man. There were few jobs around the house he wasn’t equal to, and some of the things he singlehandedly managed were downright amazing.

Not the least of these accomplishments took place on September 4, 1978. Hooker could work wonders with castoff lumber and a few tools; now he would prove adroit with softer materials.

For his own reasons, Hooker didn’t put much faith in hospitals, and he didn’t want his second child born in one. He told Janice he was afraid someone might switch babies on them.

Whether this was a true paranoia or simply a rationale for secret concerns, he made a persuasive argument and convinced his wife that the baby should be born at home. A doctor could be called in case of emergency, the hospital wasn’t all that far away, and there was no reason to expect a problem birth. Cameron was fully prepared to deliver their second child himself.

The due date approached and Jan grew larger, enduring the last, heavy weeks of pregnancy in Red Bluff’s infamous summer heat. Then, finally, she was in labor.

As her contractions came closer together, Cameron scrubbed up and got some things ready. Then he came and stood in attendance at the side of the bed. His wife panted and pushed, the baby’s head crowned, and Cameron welcomed into the world a beautiful baby girl.

The whole while — from the start of labor, through the delivery, even past the cutting of the umbilical cord — K lay just inches below the bed, listening in awe to the unseen miracle of birth.

Summer slid into autumn, and from the floor at her elbow to the ceiling at her fingertips, K remained encased in a blackness so dense her hand was invisible just inches in front of her face. Her routine rolled slowly forward, the long spells of darkness broken only when the panel was pried away and the board unbolted from the foot of the bed. Then she would scoot out into the light to accept work or nourishment or abuse, whatever was dispensed.

For Cameron, the changing seasons signaled the opportunity to engage in a little private enterprise. Rains quenched the dusty ground, the fire danger abated, and the cutting season began. With a permit, he could go into Diamond’s timberlands and scavenge lumber, cutting up cedar and oak to sell as fence posts or firewood.

Though Hooker was no stranger to hard work, this year he would have his slave’s assistance.

Up in the mountains, they set to work, looking for lumber allowed by the permit. Then they measured, cut, and split the trees into posts, bursting the pristine mountain stillness with the nasty growl of the chain saw or the clean staccato of the splitting maul. They labored and sweated, their breaths hanging in the wintry air, and soon the wood was broken into logs that they carried over to the truck, piled into the bed, and hauled home.

For K, it was a treat just to be out in the fresh air, despite her sore muscles and the branches that scratched and tore at her clothes. And for Cameron, with his slave working obediently at his side, this was what he would later call a “perfect” time.

But the Hooker household was on the eve of yet another change.

With gasoline prices soaring, high inflation, and five mouths to feed now, money was tight, so after some discussion it was decided that Janice would look for a job. At twenty-one, Jan didn’t have many marketable skills, but she landed a job at Foster’s freeze, a little fastfood place on Main Street.

Jan started work on April 21, 1979, dispensing milkshakes, cones, hamburgers, and sandwiches to lounging teenagers and harried families on tight budgets. The pay was low, but it was better than nothing, and the hours worked out well. While Cameron worked, she could stay home with the kids. When he got off at four, they’d have a brief overlap, and then she’d start work at five, working through the dinner hours until eight or, during the long summer nights, as late as midnight.

Once Jan had gone, Cameron opened the secret panel at the foot of the bed, got K out and brought her into the living room, where she would kneel and ask her master’s bidding. Sometimes Jan would have prepared dinner before she left, but as a rule he had K cook dinner. While he and little Cathy ate, K fed and cared for the baby, only sitting down to eat when Cameron gave her permission. Sometimes she was allowed to sit at the table, sometimes told to sit on the floor.

Since K was in the box when Jan left for work and again when she came home, Jan had only a faint idea of what went on while she was gone. Though Cameron told her that he had K cook dinner, it was Jan’s understanding that Cameron took care of the girls, and he said nothing to disabuse her of this notion.

Still, he saw no reason to burp the baby, change diapers, and wipe up spilled baby food when he had his slave there to do it.

During Jan’s employment, K was regularly let out of the box for longer periods. She and Cameron were alone together more often, but Hooker didn’t talk to her much. When he did, it was usually about the Company.