Killer Heat

THIRTY-SEVEN

You can't work in a licensed bar if you're a convicted felon," I said, as Mike turned the corner onto the street where Nelly Kallin lived. The ride from my office, through the Holland Tunnel and down the Jersey Turnpike, had taken less than forty minutes.

"Yeah, Coop. And jail rehabilitates perverts. What kind of fairy land are you living in? Mercer, you see any numbers?"

Neat-looking yellow brick houses stood side by side, separated from each other by narrow garages and rows of hedges, some clipped and others overgrown.

"Should be the third one on the right."

While Mike drove, Mercer and I had worked our phones, alerting Peterson and Spindlis about the call, getting a team poised to move if Kallin's information was legitimate.

"I mean that it's illegal to hire a felon to work in a place that serves booze."

"I know, I know. You think creeps like the Dylans care about that? And don't bother saying that if I hadn't insisted on shutting the bar down Saturday night, you'd be able to get the names of all the employees," Mike said, turning off the engine.

I called the listed number for Ruffles during the drive, but no one answered the phone. I left an urgent message at Frank Shea's office and hoped that he would get back to me sooner rather than later.

"We don't know if this guy gave a phony name when he applied for the job," Mercer said, trying-as always-to make peace between Mike and me. "Don't know if the Dylans did a proper record check on him. Don't know if he was being paid off the books. You want to hire a bouncer for a rowdy bar, wouldn't you think you're pretty much looking for a thug? Stay cool, Alex. We'll find him."

As the three of us started up the flagstone path, the front door of the house opened. "You're in the right place. I'm Nelly Kallin." She was in her midsixties, I guessed, short and heavyset, with frizzy gray hair that was cropped just below her ears. She was wearing a lightweight pants suit with a shapeless jacket that was meant to mask the extra weight around her solid middle.

"Thank you for calling," I said. "We're racing against the clock with this case, hoping we can identify the killer and stop him before he hits again. Any help you can give us will be critical."

Kallin ushered us through the living room into a well-furbished kitchen with a large table on which she had spread out the files she had taken home from her office.

"Why don't you sit down?" she said, pulling out one of the chairs for herself. "I'll give you whatever I can."

She had the newspaper clipping in the middle of the table and turned it around so that Mercer and Mike, sitting opposite her, could look at it again. Then she opened a manila folder and removed a handful of photographs.

"Here's Troy Rasheed," Kallin said. "This was his release picture, taken in early July."

I leaned in to look at the 8 × 10 color photo of Rasheed dressed in his orange prison jumpsuit and compared it with the man in the grainy black-and-white newsprint. A long, thick scar ran from the lower side of his left cheek down his neck like a tiny railroad track, disappearing into his collar. There was no question that he was one of the bouncers manning the door at Ruffles on Saturday night.

"Are you his shrink?" Mike asked.

"He wouldn't be on the street if I were. No, Mr. Chapman. I'm on the administrative end," Kallin said. "I've been fascinated by psychiatry all my life. Had my heart set on going to med school, but in those days it wasn't easy for women to be admitted."

That was true of the law as well, as I knew from the handful of prosecutors who had pioneered the work I did today.

"So I settled for a master's in behavioral psychology, and a PhD in Prison Administration. I've been in the department almost thirty years." She spread an array of Rasheed's older photographs across the table, like a deck of playing cards.

"But you must know where he is now, don't you? You have an address for him?" Mercer asked. "So we can get our guys looking for him-to question him-while you fill us in."

"You said you were in the Special Victims Unit right? "Yes."

Kallin reached behind her on the kitchen counter for a pack of Marlboros and lighted a cigarette. "Then you ought to know the problem. Troy had to register as a sex offender, of course. He did, as soon as he was cut loose from Kearny. He got himself an apartment in Jersey City."

She rearranged the manila folders and pulled out the one that had his registry information. "Showed up the first two weeks, which endeared him to the local cops and got them off his back. But like in every other state, the overload these monitoring units carry is appalling.

They scheduled his next appointment for mid-August, and Troy failed to keep the date."

"Has anybody checked the Jersey City address?" Mercer asked.

"Sure they did. He was out of there by August first, Detective. You know how it goes. I guess they haven't had any cases on this side of the Hudson that fit his m.o., so his file goes in the hopper with all the other flimflam artists. Troy Rasheed has no known address, like thousands of other sex offenders who've been released. Most of them are homeless. I can promise you that no one in the system will be able to tell you where he is today."

One of the most shocking problems with the sex offender registration laws that had been passed in the 1990s was the lack of resources in every state to track the dangerous felons who had completed their prison sentences-and the number of these predators who were home less.

"Tell us about him," Mike said. "Every detail that might be useful.

Tell us why you think he's capable of this-that it isn't just a coincidence that Rasheed's working at the bar that one of the victims wanted to visit."

Among the details Commissioner Scully had held back from the media was the connection between Amber Bristol and the Dylan family. Nelly Kallin was only going on the fact that the story she read had mentioned Elise Huff's downtown bar-hopping.

Like a three-card monte dealer, Kallin put her forefinger on an old mug shot-upside down to her-and swept it smoothly around the table so each of us could look at it. "Troy Rasheed. Age twenty-two." The dark-skinned, rail-thin young man sneered at the camera. He was wearing a T-shirt and tight jeans, with close-cropped black hair that was shaved on the sides of his head.

"How long ago was that?" I asked.

"He's forty-six now."

"And in prison all this time?"

"Every minute of it," she said, targeting another photo with her finger and moving it in a circle to display for us. "Bulking up, working out, lifting weights. We build better perps in the jail yard, Ms. Cooper.

We give them sharper tools for another shot at their victims when they leave us. Troy earned himself the mas macho reputation when he survived a throat slashing by some Hoboken gang members he dissed in the cafeteria one day. Spent a long time decorating his remade body with prison art. He must have been dreaming for decades about the day his pumped-up persona would have a brand-new chance to torment another woman."

The lean face and wiry body of the young Troy Rasheed had aged into a solid, hardened adult. His arms and chest reflected years of bodybuilding, and some of the sequential photographs, showing him in short-sleeved prison garb, recorded the annual addition of tattoos above his wrist and on the side of his neck, where they highlighted his thick scar.

I lifted two of the pictures to study the markings. "Not the usual, are they?"

Most jails had strict rules against inmates tattooing one another.

But with homemade tattoo guns, the artists who violated the prohibitions were among the most popular prisoners. The standard swastikas, guns, and spider webs often masked gang affiliation symbols, but Troy's arms were lined with two-inch-high initials elaborately drawn in a flourish of script letters.

"His victims' names, Ms. Cooper. The big ones on his biceps are the women he was convicted of raping. So he'd never forget them, he said. The smaller ones seem to be the vics for whom he didn't get nailed." Nelly Kallin stood up to crush her cigarette. "I'm only sorry you can't see the serpents."

"Serpents?" I was thinking of the body of Connie Wade and the many snakes that inhabited desolate Bannerman Island.

"He's got several on his chest. And one large constrictor that's wrapped around his penis. That made Troy a hero to most of the creeps with rap sheets like his. I only hope to God it was as painful for him to get it as I like to think it was."

"Tattoos are the new T-shirts," Mike said.

"What?"

"When we were kids, Coop, people went someplace they bought postcards. Collected 'em or sent 'em to relatives to show where they'd been. Then ten, fifteen years ago, you take a trip and suddenly big fat Middle America comes home with their vacation hot spots plastered across their chests instead of on a picture postcard. 'Virginia Is for Lovers.' 'Bubba's BBQ.' 'Stonehenge Rocks.' Your friends-excuse me- it's St. Bart's and Aspen and those tasteful little logos that scream some designer spa you have to go to in order to recognize the secret symbol.

Now, you been somewhere, done something, raped somebody-just friggin' engrave it on your body."

"That's Troy, Detective. He wears his life story."

"How come you know so much about his tattoos?"

"Part of my business. Like you say, every time one of these inmates defies our orders, it's to make a point. His T-shirt of the moment. And it's my job to know what that point is-what gang, what faction, what message, what hate group. They're all documented by the department, whenever these guys have a physical."

"Twenty-two. That was the age of his first arrest?" Mike asked.

"No, sir," Kallin said, leaning against her kitchen sink. "Started with a juvenile record. Nothing remarkable. Mostly burglaries and thefts. Arson, too. Didn't appear to move into sexual abuse until he was about seventeen, from what anyone could tell. Beat the first couple of cases but then was convicted for a series of rapes that occurred in the north Jersey suburbs, near the Palisades."

"You mentioned DNA on the phone," I said. "But this conviction was before DNA was being used in the courts. Before 1989."

"Yes, Troy was caught by fingerprint identification and then lineup IDs. Abducted each of the women after they parked their cars on their way into their apartments. Forced them into his van, raped them, then dumped them out-alive, in those days-in deserted places along the highway. There were prints at the last scene, on the victim's leather handbag. By the time his final appeal was perfected seven years later, the defense attorney made an ill-advised motion to have the DNA analyzed. It all matched."

"What do you know about his victims?"

"Whatever is in the presentence reports," Kallin said, returning to the table and leafing through that folder. "The women were each young-in their early twenties. All strangers. They seemed to be random choices, just girls in the wrong place at the right time for him to cross their paths."

"Nothing to connect them to one another?" Mercer asked. "Not that the prosecutor ever figured,

I don't think," she said, shaking her head. "One was a nurse coming off the night shift at a community hospital. The second one-"

"How was she dressed?" Mike asked.

"The nurse? I don't know. You can look through the police reports for a description. The second one was a grad student who worked evenings as a security guard at a mall. Not armed or anything. Just sitting there making sure no one came out of the dressing room with stolen clothes stuffed in her shopping bag."

"But in uniform?" Mike interrupted Kallin again and she seemed annoyed.

"I don't remember. The third one was a stewardess, on her way home from Newark after a flight from Spain."

Three for three possibly in some kind of uniformed dress.

"The crimes, Miss Kallin," I said. "Can you tell us what Rasheed did to these women?"

"Would any of you like a drink?"

"No, thanks."

She walked to her refrigerator and opened it, removing a half-full bottle of white wine. She took a glass from a cabinet above the sink and uncorked the bottle.

"I had to look at him almost every day," she said. "I had to be civil to this animal, knowing what he'd done. Hard to believe it wasn't enough to keep him away from society for the rest of his life."

"His m.o., Ms. Kallin," I said. "It's important for us to know."

She poured the wine to the rim of the glass and sipped at it before she returned to the table. "Troy had been doing burglaries in the area. Out of work, breaking into apartments to steal stuff that he could sell. Electronic equipment, jewelry, silverware-whatever he could get his hands on. The first girl in this pattern-those initials on his left arm? Her name is Jocelyn. She said she was tired after a long evening at work. Got out of her car and was walking to her condo, oblivious to everything because she was home. Know what I mean? You get that safe feeling that you've got the day behind you when you've reached familiar territory?"

"Exactly." We'd each heard it from scores of victims.

"Jocelyn saw Troy get out of the van and walk toward her building. Calm, easy, not in a hurry. She could see his face in the streetlight overhead. He nodded and gave her a big smile. She gave one right back at him," Kallin said, pausing to look at Mercer before she went on. "Said there weren't a lot of blacks living in her complex, so she had a moment of concern, but chastised herself for having such a racist thought once he smiled at her."

I knew that reaction wasn't a first for Mercer, either.

"He got behind her and in a flash had his arm around her neck and a knife to her ear. Told her he'd kill her if she screamed, that he just wanted her cash and her jewelry. Dragged her out of the light to his van. The rear door was open-just waiting for her-and he pushed her down inside, banging her head against the floor of it to stun her." That gave him time, no doubt, to get in and close the door. "Troy must have had a sock in the van, ready to gag her. That's what he used in his first couple of cases, too-the ones he got away with. Jocelyn said he shoved the sock in her mouth, while he straddled her. Then he put the knife down so that he could bind her hands together."

"Bound her with what?" Mike asked.

"Duct tape. Also in the van, like he'd done this before. She testified that he was swift and sure about what he was doing. Tied her feet with rope, too. Then he drove off."

"Where to?"

"Jocelyn testified that she didn't have any idea. A wooded area, dark and isolated. There's miles of it all along the Palisades. He pulled over and climbed into the back with her. That's when the torture began."

Nelly Kallin lit another cigarette and swallowed her wine like it was water.

"What did Troy do to her?"

"First he played with the knife, Ms. Cooper. He traced the tip of it around her eyes and down the side of her nose. He scraped the surface of her face until she bled at the corner of her lips, so that she could taste the blood as it ran into her mouth and was absorbed by the cotton sock. Then he used it to cut her clothing off, ripping her skin as he did. Nothing life-threatening, not stabbing her, but leaving lacerations the length of her body. He cut the rope off her ankles so that he could penetrate. You can read the rest if you can't figure it out," she said, pat ting the thick folder that held the detailed police reports.

"And that's where he dumped her?" Mike asked.

"No, no. He abused Jocelyn for hours, for most of the night. Then he retied her legs, drove away, and left her just before dawn at another point off the highway. Threw the handbag out, too. Never bothered to take her money. That's how the cops got his fingerprints."

"Who found her?"

"A sanitation worker. The patent leather from her pocketbook reflected the sun's rays. The guy walked a few feet into the woods to explore it."

"Was the body wrapped-I mean, was Jocelyn naked when he left her there?"

Nelly Kallin licked her thumb and paged through the file. "I don't think she was. I'm pretty sure each of the women was covered up with something. Here it is. Old blankets, the same kind in each case."

"Green," Mike said. "Drab olive green, I'm betting. The scumbag must have cornered the market in those."

She handed him the report that confirmed what we already knew. "In each of these instances, Ms. Kallin," I asked, "did Rasheed ejaculate?"

"Yes. Those were the semen samples that ultimately led to the postconviction DNA match. But you won't be so lucky."

"What do you mean?"

"You haven't got DNA in any of these cases, have you?"

Another fact that hadn't been made public by the commissioner. I shouldn't have answered her question but I was fascinated that she was so confident.

"No, no, we don't."

"Troy Rasheed has been chemically castrated."

"Jesus," Mike said, as always put off more by sexually explicit conversation than by the cold clinical facts of murder. "You could do that in New Jersey? By the boa constrictor on his penis or by the docs?"

"He volunteered for it, Mr. Chapman. He was smart enough to think it would make it easier for him to get out of prison. They didn't chop it off, you know. He just took ten months' worth of injections of a drug called Depo-Provera."

"So what are you saying, ma'am? That Troy Rasheed couldn't be a sexual predator? On the one hand, you're telling us he's our man, and on the other hand, you're saying he's been castrated."

Nelly Kallin's impatience with Mike was growing. "You think these crimes are only about sex? You don't think binding and torturing women has something to do with power and physical domination?" And anger and lust, and sometimes pure pleasure.

"So we've got a serial killer who's impotent."

"It's not these bastards' gonads that drive them to assault their victims, Detective. It's their twisted heads.