Killer Heat

THIRTY-NINE

Son of Uncle Sam.

"When was Troy Rasheed in the army?" Mercer asked.

"He enlisted when he was nineteen and was thrown out less than two years later," Kallin said.

"Where did he serve? Why was he tossed?"

"For the six months before his discharge, he was in Germany.

There was an incident with a woman on the base. He wasn't the only one involved-there were three or four guys from his command. Sort of a date rape-a lot of alcohol and some not very clear allegations.

"Was there a trial?" I asked, wondering if that young woman, too, had been in uniform when the drinking began.

"Way back then? No way. You probably know what it's like trying to get records out of the military. Everything disappears. And a drunken female claiming sexual assault? The army still doesn't do so well with that today. I can't believe the girl was taken too seriously. Troy must have had a stack of other offenses leading up to that incident."

Kallin stretched her neck and looked out the window again.

"Personality disorder, NOS," Mike said. "That sounds pretty mild for a serial rapist."

She turned to look at him and loosened up for the first time. "You'd fit that diagnosis for sure, Mr. Chapman. Anybody interesting would. Troy's really an ASPD but the shrinks didn't have to create a stir by going that far. The defense team couldn't rebut this one. He'd been tagged with it before he even encountered the legal system."

Anti-Social Personality Disorder was one of the hallmarks of serial killers in the DSM-IV, or Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, the bible of the forensic psychiatric community.

I started to tick off the traits of this psychopathic behavior as listed in the DSM. "Failure to conform to social norms, limited range of human emotions, lack of empathy for the suffering of others-"

"Which leads to risk-seeking behavior," Kallin said. "Deceitful, impulsive, aggressive. Repeated lying, use of aliases."

There would have been no reason for Troy Rasheed to use his real name in applying for a job with Kiernan Dylan. How easy it must have been for him to slip away from New Jersey after he had complied with the need to register his name with the state's monitors.

"Do you have his military records here?" I asked, pointing at her stack of folders.

"No. The prosecutor was never able to get them-just the discharge summary."

"What do you know about his family background?"

Some movement in the corner of my eye drew my attention to the window. I looked out but saw nothing.

"You're jumpier than I am," Kallin said to me.

Mercer eased himself out of the chair. "I left my cell phone in the car. I'd better get it. Don't want to miss the lieutenant's callback. Mind if I use this door?"

I knew that Mercer was going to check around the outside of the house. It wasn't likely that anyone could have followed us, but I'd been even more on edge since Kerry Hastings had been injured simply by virtue of her proximity to me.

Nelly got up, too, removed the chain, and unlocked the kitchen door, which led onto a deck. I watched as Mercer disappeared down the path alongside the house.

"Troy's mother died more than ten years ago. Before that, she came to see him once a week, every single week. A sister who's married with three kids, but she lives in Texas. His father's still alive. I called him after the hearing in July."

"To give him the good news about junior coming home?" Mike said.

"Oh, no. When Troy was transferred to my facility, Mr. Rasheed made an appointment with me. He hadn't visited his son, never even attended a day of the trial. Troy was the great disappointment of his life and, unlike his wife, he just cut himself off from the kid."

"You mean when Troy was arrested?"

"Before that, actually. When he was discharged from the army. The father, Wilson Rasheed, had always dreamed of a military career for himself, except that he has a congenital heart defect," Kallin said. "Whatever it is, it disqualified him from service. But he was a civilian contractor for a long time, building facilities on some bases up and down the East Coast. Noninstitutional structures-housing and such. And Mr. Rasheed didn't want anything to do with his son after the kid's discharge."

"That's a pretty severe reaction, considering Troy was only twentyone at the time," Mike said.

"I think some of the son's personality traits were inherited."

Mercer came back into sight and waved his cell phone over his head as he climbed the steps and opened the door. I knew it had been in his pocket since we left the car, but he was signaling to me that no one was lurking around Kallin's house.

"The father's a real loner," Nelly went on. "Retired and reclusive. Still has the apartment in Newark that Troy was raised in but spends most of his time in a cabin up in the mountains, near Sussex. I don't think he's got heat or electricity. Just his guns."

Nelly Kallin got up again and opened her pocketbook, which was on the kitchen counter. She removed a piece of paper from her wallet and unfolded it.

"Handguns? Shotguns?" Mike asked. "Has the father got a record, too?"

"He's a hunter, Detective. Never been in trouble with the law. I don't know much about guns, but he's got some kind of collection of old military stuff. Spent all his spare time hoarding it away."

The three of us exchanged glances, and Mike let out a soft whistle. "Whoa, Nelly."

"How do you know that, Ms. Kallin? If Troy and his father had no contact?"

"Some of the background is from the family history in our documents and some is what his father told me when I met him last month." She held the creased paper out to Mike. "This isn't anywhere in the prison records, do you understand? That's the way Mr. Rasheed wants it, and that's what I agreed to do."

"Why?"

"Troy tried to call him at the apartment when he got the news of his release. First time in all those years the son even made an attempt to reach him. But Wilson Rasheed had changed his number, unlisted the phone. He knows even more than we do, Mr. Chapman. He doesn't ever want to see his son again.

"The guards reported a flurry of calls by Troy that same day-trying to find his sister out west, old neighbors in Newark, any link to the outside world," Kallin went on. "But he's been away an awfully long time. People moved on and most of them were happy to have left Troy Rasheed behind."

Mike reached out for the paper. "You have the father's new number?"

Nelly nodded. "I called him right after I phoned Ms. Cooper today. It just rang and rang. I doubt he's at the apartment. He wasn't planning to wait around for Troy to knock on his door."

"So this first address is Wilson's place in Newark, right?" Mike said. "And the other one is his cabin in the mountains?"

"Exactly. He wanted me to have both, but he insisted that neither be part of the official record."

"Why?" I asked.

"Because, Ms. Cooper," Nelly said, "Wilson Rasheed had nothing but contempt for the psychiatrists who tried to treat Troy over the years. He didn't want to hear from them, and he never wanted to see his son again. I promised to let him know when the release was imminent, and that's the last I expect to hear from him."

"How come this whole commitment proceeding gets cloaked in so much secrecy?" Mike asked.

"No one will talk about it," Nelly said. "Not prison officials, not the AG, not the public defenders."

"Troy was turned down for release twice, you said."

"Right before his second hearing, he had a flare-up. He was on his way to his therapy session and he brushed up against a guard. A woman guard. His lawyer claimed it was an accident and that it wasn't sexually motivated."

One more lady in uniform, even when Troy was behind bars.

"The state shrink testified that he must have had some kind of sexual arousal by engineering such close contact-the prisoner's hand touching the genitals of a female guard. Sent him to solitary confinement, which triggered a hunger strike and a refusal by Troy to speak to staff.

"At the second hearing, the AG made a big deal of it. He argued that the prisoner's reaction spoke to his egocentric view of the world, showed his complete lack of self-control. And the judge agreed, saying that Troy was once again asserting his entitlement, acting against his best interest."

"And Troy never admitted anything about it, did he?" Mike said.

Nelly Kallin just laughed.

"So back into jail for another year," I said.

"That's when he must have found a mentor in the inmate population. Some other sicko who took Troy under his wing," Kallin said, tapping her finger on the pile of folders.

"What changed?"

"He'd been known for very recalcitrant behavior. Denials, rationalizations, blame shifting. Years of it. Now he became an active participant in treatment sessions for the first time. For a realistic chance at release, an inmate has to show he's deeply committed to changing his life."

"And Troy Rasheed did?" I asked.

"He stopped fighting the conclusions the shrinks had made in the past. He told them he'd wear a security bracelet, a chip with a GPS tracking device. He offered to urinate in a jar any time they wanted him to. He submitted to a penile plethysmograph for the first time since arriving at Kearny."

"A what?" Mike asked.

"They use it here like a lie detector for rapists."

"Shit. A peter meter?"

Kallin tilted her head toward Mike and suppressed a smile. "It's a tubular ring filled with mercury that's placed around the prisoner's penis. They show him photographs-provocative ones, like women in bondage, images of things that have traditionally excited him. Then the doctors measure any changes in circumference that reflect the magnitude of his erections."

"And that kind of witch doctoring is enough to let a serial rapist walk out the door?"

"Not in my book. But that and his voluntary submission to chemical castration-even though that's only a temporary fix-put Troy at the head of the class. This last year, he became the therapeutic community's idealized vision of the rehabilitated sex offender."

"No such animal," Mercer said.

"Despite the dreadful criminal history and the years of predatory behavior and fantasies," I said, "the AG's shrinks didn't consider him a grave risk for reoffending?"

"The expert who testified for the state this summer only met Troy Rasheed for the first time a few weeks before the hearing."

"That's absurd. What about the docs who'd been treating him for years?"

"Another catch-22, Ms. Cooper. Therapists who've actually treated the prisoner don't normally testify, since that might interfere with the actual treatment sessions."

"So these docs only see his current conduct, hear his recent statements," I said. "They don't know a fraction of what others who've had contact with the inmate would know, except from what's in the cold written reports."

"And since the records of the previous hearings are sealed, there isn't anyone else who's going to tell you what Troy said to me when he learned that he was coming to this facility instead of being released three years ago."

"What's that, Nelly?" Mike asked.

"It's a blueprint for his future, Detective. It's the reason I told the psychiatrists from the outset that his next victims weren't likely to survive their encounters with Troy Rasheed," Nelly Kallin said. "The day he was admitted to Kearny, he asked me whether there was any such thing as civil commitment for murderers."

She reached for her wine glass and clenched the stem of it in her hand.

"No, I told him. No, there wasn't. A kid Troy's age would probably have been paroled long before now, even for homicide. We both figured out that piece of irony. He just looked at me when I answered him, and laughed.

" 'I'd be better off if I'd killed those girls, wouldn't I?' he said to me." Nelly Kallin closed her eyes and sighed. "He was right about that, you know.