Killer Heat (25 page)

I stared at the face in the photograph. The man Kallin was
talking about was standing on the top step as the three of us
walked out of Ruffles. We paid him no attention, and left him
behind to deal with the crowd when we took the Dylan kid away. He
was tall and powerfully built, with a shaved head and tattoos up
and down his well-muscled arms.

“Mr. Rasheed was working at that bar,” I said. “He's a
bouncer.”

“He's a convicted predator, Ms. Cooper. He raped women-three
that he got caught for and dozens more the prosecution couldn't
prove, back in the days before DNA. Rasheed tortured them all,
too,” Kallin said. "It's what he's good at. It's what he likes to
do.

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.”