Perfect Victim by Carla Norton, Christine McGuire Page B

called “good-tempered” and “easy to get along with,” but his very mildness seemed to be what characterized him most. He kept his distance, as if he didn’t want to attract attention to himself.
    But at night, yes, there was quite a bit of activity over at the Hooker place-lights on at all hours, noises.
    “At night you could hear his electric saw going in his shed,”
    a neighbor said. “He was always busy doing something.”
    Another neighbor remembered sitting on his porch in the dark, watching Hooker carry buckets of dirt out of the shed and then dumping them on a mound, over and over again.
    No one recalled any incidents of abuse or perversion, not the slightest hint of anything sinister in connection with the lone, single-wide trailer at the end of the short dirt road where the Hookers lived. The family seemed not to have much money, but there’s nothing dishonorable about being a bit shaggy, and they weren’t much different from other families in the area.
    Neighbors remembered the woman they knew as “Kay” taking the Hooker girls for walks, riding past on her bike, and jogging around the neighborhood. To most, she’d seemed sweet, friendly, and apparently free to come and go at will.
    “Everything seemed normal to us,” one neighbor told an outof-town reporter. “She seemed real friendly. She would slow down, wave, and smile. We didn’t pick up on anything wrong.”
    Cameron Hooker’s coworkers at Diamond responded to the news of his arrest with almost universal skepticism. During the twelve years he’d worked there, Hooker had proven himself a dependable worker — mechanically inclined, clever, and even having some artistic talent, with those carvings and sculptures he was always working on. Although some of the women who worked at Diamond regarded this tall, gangly fellow as “a nerd,” Hooker was generally well liked.
    Hooker’s locker at work was broken into shortly after his arrest. There are conflicting opinions about the significance of this. No one admits to having done it, and it’s impossible to know what was taken.
    The police, who were at first unaware of a locker at Diamond, wouldn’t get around to searching it for more than a month. They assume that a friend or friends of Hooker’s “moved incriminating items. “It just goes to show how well liked Hooker was, Lt. Jerry Brown believes.
    Others say this was simple curiosity on the part of Hooker’s coworkers — they wanted to see what he had — but nothing was taken.
    One Diamond worker, who asked not to be identified, reported that a couple of “nosy guys” broke into Hooker’s locker, removed some items, and threw them into “the chipper” — a piece of machinery that “looks like a vegematic” and shreds wood up “like wooden potato chips” to make fiber for paper. He didn’t know what items were destroyed but speculated that the motivation was to protect Hooker or themselves.
    In any case, when the police finally got around to getting a search warrant for the locker, they found some negatives, a bag of clay, and some soft-porn molds, but nothing of profound interest.
    Moreover, he’d never given the smallest indication of anything awry at home. He rarely talked of his family life, hardly ever brought up sex, and in complete contradiction to stereotypical visions of burly, brutal rapists, Hooker was generally mild, quiet, and good-humored. The rumor even began to spread that Jan and this other woman were in cahoots together — maybe they were lesbians — and they’d cooked up the whole story just to fix him.
    The townspeople read the newspaper accounts and wondered.
    But to one local family, the press coverage was more than just startling, it was painful. For more than a decade, Harold and Lorena Hooker had quietly owned a twenty-acre ranch off of Highway 99, south of Red Bluff, near the town of Gerber. Now the peace of these wide open spaces was shattered, and their elder son was being held on $500,000