Killer Heat

FORTY

You mind if we take these files with us, Nelly?" Mike asked. "Make copies and return them to you? It would give the task force a great head start to get all this background."

"I've gone this far. You might as well have them. "How about you? Wouldn't you be more comfortable staying with a friend or relative till we find Troy?"

"I'm more worried about my supervisor reacting to the fact that I've gone off the reservation than I am about him," she said. "I've decided to spend the week at my sister's house in Princeton. It will keep me out of reach of the department so I won't have to dodge phone calls."

Mercer was flipping through one of the many manila folders. "Why do you think Rasheed's rapes won't be blitz attacks anymore?"

"He didn't make it through all these years, especially navigating a release, without learning how to become a manipulator. He's been rewarded for learning that behavior."

"The classic sex offender motivational attributes-power, anger, lust-you put any stock in that?"

"Not very much," Nelly said. "Sure, these perpetrators are angry, but if it was all about that, then any kind of physical assault would work. Clinical studies make it pretty clear that anger inhibits sexual arousal. Along with anxiety, it's a major cause of dysfunction."

Nelly Kallin was intelligent and direct. Mike was listening to her intently, with clear respect for her observations.

"There's a reason that a sexual act is the weapon these men use. Perhaps because it's the ultimate humiliation, the most intimate kind of act they can impose on another human being."

"Does it mean anything to you if I tell you that each of his victims-"

"Mr. Wallace, I'm not a shrink," Kallin said, shaking a finger at him. "Just a wannabe."

"You're smart, Nelly," Mike said, pacing again. "You've seen Troy Rasheed-if he's our man-day after day for more than three years now. We want your perspective."

"If every one of these victims had some kind of uniform on when she was attacked, would that surprise you?" Mercer asked.

Nelly Kallin stopped to think. "Not really. Get your hands on his military records. He's been frustrated by that experience all his life. His father's ambitions for him, his own discharge, the fact that it ostensibly had to do with an assault on a female member of the service. Maybe he blames her for all his problems. He's had a few decades to chew on that."

I could hear shouting outside the house. It distracted Nelly and she glanced around at the windows once more. Mercer looked up from the files.

"Control," she said. "I'd say that control and having someone weaker than he was, someone he could think of as inferior to himself, that probably had something to do with Troy's crimes."

"You mean the way he bound the women, tortured them for a period of time?" I asked.

"Sure. You've probably worked with as many sexual sadists as I have, Ms. Cooper. Don't you think there's something else going on here?"

The intense humidity had wilted my clothes and created blond curls around my forehead. I pushed them back. "I do," I said. "Of course I do."

"The docs have known about all this for more than a century, Kallin said. "Krafft-Ebing and his definition of sadism."

"The experience of sexually pleasurable sensations, including or gasm, produced by acts of cruelty," I said. "The DSM hasn't done any better than that definition, all these years later."

Mike was running his hand through his hair.

"I think Troy Rasheed likes hurting women," Kallin said. "It may be as simple as that, Detective. It's one of the few things in life that has given him pleasure, and he's had a long time to look forward to enjoying that sensation again."

She stood up and walked out of the room, returning with a notebook. "I've collected my own 'who's who,' Ms. Cooper. Sometimes the young shrinks aren't even aware of the history of these crimes, they've got so many new perps to study. Gilles de Rais-ever hear of him?"

"A fifteenth-century French nobleman who kidnapped, tortured, and murdered children," I said. Like Kallin, I had researched these crimes for more than a decade, trying to understand the motivations of these monsters and crimes that made no sense at all.

"Hundreds of children. Entirely for his own pleasure and physical delight, is how he described it. His 'inexpressible' pleasure, to quote him exactly," she said, turning several pages. "Vincenz Verzeni?"

I shook my head. "No."

"Italian, nineteenth century. I'm surprised you missed him. Raped and mutilated his victims. Described his unspeakable delight in strangling women, experiencing erections while he did so."

Nelly Kallin closed the looseleaf book and stacked it on top of one of the piles. "Shrinks spend a disproportionate amount of their time analyzing motivation, grasping at reasons 'why' these men commit such heinous crimes. You don't need to look much beyond the fact that many of them simply like to do it-something the rest of us can't begin to fathom. It's what gives these sadists pleasure."

Voices outside the window were closer now, voices of people who seemed to be arguing with each other as they ran up the path next to the house.

Mercer got to his feet as Nelly Kallin grabbed his arm to hold him back.

"It's not a problem, Mr. Wallace," she said.

But something crashed through one of the panes of the kitchen window at that moment and I jumped as glass shattered onto the floor behind me.