Killer Heat

'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.'

'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.