Killer Heat (26 page)

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.

Well, then, Nelly,“ Mike said, one arm on the kitchen table and
the other brushing back his hair, trying to work his charm on her.
”Why don't you take us inside Troy Rasheed's head?"

Mercer was on the phone to Lieutenant Peterson suggesting an
allpoints bulletin for the released prisoner. He was reading a date
of birth from the prison records and the inmate number so that New
Jersey's Department of Corrections could e-mail a copy of the
photograph to go out on the wire services

He was paroled in July, Loo. We can always pick him up on a
violation."

Kallin turned to look at Mercer and wagged a finger at him.
“That's wrong. There's no parole hold. You can't get him for
that.”

Mercer put his hand over the receiver. “What do you mean?”

“Rasheed served all his time. Maxed out after twenty-one. The
last three years of incarceration have been a civil
commitment.”

“Sweet,” Mike said. “A state that allows chemical castration and civil commitment. Get used to me, Nelly. I may pack my
bags and take up residence in New Jersey.”

There were few issues more controversial in the criminal justice
system than the new laws, passed in fewer than twenty states, that
allowed the government to authorize the involuntary commitment of
convicted sex offenders who have completed their entire prison
terms. The acknowledgment of the high recidivist rate of rapes-and
murders- by these predators, all over America, led to this radical
form of preventive detention, in which the prisoners are
transferred to psychiatric lockups at the end of their terms and
held for as long as they are deemed a risk to society.

“Politicians love this kind of hot-button fix, Mr. Chapman.”

“Put away the bad with the mad and everybody on the street
cheers. We're just revving up for it at home,” Mike said. The
legislature had defeated proposals to introduce the law in New
York, until the governor was successful in pushing it through just
months earlier.

“The defense lobby fought it pretty hard in New York,” I said. I
hadn't yet participated in any case that had gone forward. “Is that
why you were so worried about your role in telling us about
Rasheed's release? This commitment proceeding is a very hush-hush
event, isn't it? I've only heard rumors from my counterpart in
Bergen County.”

Mercer hung up the phone and joined us at the table.

Nelly Kallin pushed her glass away. “The whole thing gives new
meaning to the word secret. If you knew how many men have
been sent to Kearny and how many have come out, you'd understand
why. We've got close to three hundred prisoners being held there.
The state wins 95 percent of the cases, and the hearings are
closed.”

“How can they be closed? Who attends them?” Mercer asked.

“New Jersey, unlike the few other states that have done this,
seals the commitment process. We don't use a jury system, on the
theory that we're protecting the patient's confidentiality. So Troy
Rasheed's name has never entered any public record since he
finished serving his sentence.”

“Nowhere? There's no record of this?”

“No. Two Superior Court judges handle all of these matters, and
then the cases are sealed. If you don't hear the facts from me, I
doubt there's any way you could find out any of them. And once I
tell you, I'll probably be planning an early retirement.”

“Nelly, you point me in the right direction and I'll take it the
rest of the way. If you go, I go with you. Coop won't let them can
you,” Mike said.

She looked at me for reassurance that I couldn't give her. This
wasn't the normal whistle-blower situation.

“How did it work?” Mercer asked, his deep voice and earnest
expression helping to calm the nervous woman. “Rasheed's
hearing.”

“Like every other uncomfortable mix of law and psychiatry,” she
said. “The SVPA-the Sexually Violent Predator Act was passed in
1998, sort of designed along the lines of commitments for the
mentally ill. But there's a major distinction.”

“What's that?”

“In a proceeding for a mental patient, the focus is on the
patient's state of mind, his current condition. Things he did in
the past, even in those cases in which crimes were committed,
they're not usually relevant. But at Kearny-and for Troy-they use
the prior crimes as critical evidence of his thinking, his
behavior, his probability of offending again in the future. The law
lets us keep these monsters confined for their thoughts, not just
their actions.”

“Count me in,” Mike said, standing and starting to pace the old
wooden floorboards of Kallin's kitchen. “Thought police-my kind of
department. I'd love to make collars just for what the bad guys are
thinking, before they pull the trigger.”

“So the patient's state of mind is at issue,” I said. “I guess
that lets in just about everything, right? Hearsay, old psych
evaluations from the pretrial exams, statements he made in
treatment, while incarcerated?”

“That just scratches the surface. The shrinks testify about the
prisoners' sexual tastes and their fantasies-what are supposed to
be their fantasies. Prosecutors are able to shop around for
psychiatric opinions. Well, the state can almost always find some
reason to keep these guys behind bars.”

“Then why did Rasheed get out this time?” I asked.

“Because he learned how to beat us. Troy copied the handful of
guys who made it out before him. And I'm convinced that you'll find
he didn't pounce on these victims-these women who were murdered-
like he did on Jocelyn and the others. I'm sure of that. Something
put them in his path and this time he thought he knew how to get
them to come along with him, without even having to show a
knife.”

There seemed little prospect at the moment of reconstructing the
last hours-or minutes-of the lives of Amber Bristol, Elise Huff,
and Connie Wade.

“So how did it go for Rasheed?” Mercer asked again.

“Almost four years ago,” Kallin said, “just a few days from the
end of his jail time, he was told he was being transferred to
Kearny. That's how it always begins. A secret process, with a
surprise notification.”

“But who picks which prisoner goes?”

“My colleagues-the administrators at DOC. No written
guidelines.”

“That's part of the reason these commitments are being
challenged in federal court,” I said. “The inmates claim they're
unconstitutionally arbitrary.”

Kallin hesitated and looked out the window. I followed her line
of vision and saw only the hedges between her small yard and the
house next door.

“Did you see someone? Something?”

She went back to twiddling her thumbs. “Probably just the
neighbors.”

Mike stood behind her and kept his eye on the narrow
alleyway.

“After that, the attorney general's office screens the cases.
They usually support us in about half the applications. Troy was no
different from any other inmate when he got here. He'd spent almost
half his life in prison, was just days from walking out, but then
got smacked in the face with the news that he wasn't going
anywhere.”

“So the first hearing was three years ago,” Mercer said.

“Yes. And there aren't many perps who make it through that
initial one. They're so angry about the transfer, all the state has
to do is present its diagnosis and tack on the fact that the guy
has bad control of his impulses. What they really have to show-and
it was easy in Troy's case-is that he has serious difficulty in
controlling his behavior.”

“What was his diagnosis?” I asked. “Personality disorder, NOS,
Ms. Cooper,” Nelly Kallin said. “NOS?”

"Not otherwise specified. It's the same diagnosis that got him
dis- charged from the army when he was twenty-one years old.

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.

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.”