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.