Jeffery Deaver - The Devil's Teardrop

The man who was not Detective Len Hardy, a fictional name, but was in reality Edward Fielding made his way to the elevator.

He had until 1:07 before the automated alarm would go off.

Plenty of time.

The building was virtually deserted but still he walked the way he knew he should walk. With an aura not of urgency but of preoccupation. So if he were to run into one of the few remaining agents here they'd merely glance at his pass and, judging Fielding's demeanor, decide to let him continue on to wherever he was headed on his important business.

He inhaled deeply, took in the smells of the laboratory, the offices, the morgue. Feeling a wrenching thrill to be here-in the center of the law enforcement universe. The corridors of FBI headquarters. He remembered, a year ago, the Digger muttering insistently about going to an art museum in Hartford. Fielding had agreed and the crazed man had stood for an hour in front of a Doré illustration from the Divine Comedy: Dante and Virgil about to descend into hell. This is just what Fielding felt now-as if he were on a tour of the underworld.

As he walked through the hallways he spoke silently to his teammates. No, Agent Lukas and Parker Kincaid and Dr. John Evans… No, my motive isn't revenge for faded politics or terrorism. It's not exposing social injustice. Nor is it greed. Twenty million? Christ, I could've asked for ten times that.

No, my motive is simply perfection.

The idea of the perfect crime was a cliché, true. But Fielding had learned something interesting when he'd been studying linguistics, looking for just the right words and phrases to use in the extortion note. In an article in the American Journal of Linguistics a philologist-a language expert-had written that although serious writers are told to avoid them, clichés have value because they describe fundamental truths in universally comprehensible terms.

The perfect crime.

Fielding's holy chalice.

Perfection… It was intoxicating to him. Perfection was everything-the way he ironed his shirts and polished his shoes and trimmed his ear hairs, the way he set up his crimes, the way they were executed.

If Fielding had had an aptitude for the law he'd have been a lawyer and devoted his life to creating the perfect defenses for impossibly guilty clients. If he'd had a lust for the outdoors he'd have taught himself everything there was to learn about mountain climbing and made the perfect solo ascent to the summit of Everest.

But those activities didn't excite him.

Crime did.

This was just a fluke, he supposed, to be born utterly amoral. The way some men are bald and some cats have six toes. It was purely nature, he'd decided, not nurture. His parents were loving and dependable; dullness was their only sin. Fielding's father had been an insurance executive in Hartford, his mother a homemaker. He experienced no deprivation, no abuse. From an early age, though, he simply believed that the law didn't apply to him. It made no sense. Why, he spent hours wondering, should man put restraints on himself? Why shouldn't we go wherever our desires and minds take us?

Though it was some years before he learned it, Fielding had been born with a pure criminal personality, a textbook sociopath.

So while he studied algebra and calculus and biology at St. Mary's High School the young man also worked at his true calling.

And, as in all disciplines, that education had ups and downs.

Fielding, in juvenile detention for setting fire to the boyfriend of a girl he had a crush on (should've parked my car three or four blocks away).

Fielding, beaten nearly to death by two police officers whom he was blackmailing with photos of transvestites giving them blow jobs in their squad car (should have had a strong-arm accomplice with him).

Fielding, successfully extorting a major canned-food manufacturer by feeding their cattle an enzyme that mimicked a positive test for botulism (though he never picked up the money at the drop because he couldn't figure out how to get away with the cash undetected).

Live and learn…

College didn't interest him much. The students at Bennington had money but they left their dorm rooms open and there was no challenge in robbing them. He enjoyed occasional felonious assaults on coeds-it was challenging to rape someone in such a way that she doesn't realized she's being molested. But Fielding's lust was for the game itself, not sex, and by his junior year he was focusing on what he called "clean crimes," like robbery. Not "messy crimes," like rape. He buckled down to get his psych degree and dreamt about escaping from Ben & Jerry land and into the real world, where he could practice his craft.

Over the next ten years Fielding, back in his native Connecticut, did just that: honed and practiced. Robbery mostly. He avoided business crimes like check kiting and securities fraud because of the paper trails. He avoided drugs and hijacking because you couldn't work alone and Fielding never met anyone he trusted.

He was twenty-seven when he killed for the first time.

An opportunistic-an impulse-crime, very unlike him. He was having a cappuccino at a coffee shop in a strip mall outside of Hartford. He saw a woman come out of a jewelry store with a package. There was something about the way she walked-slightly paranoid-that suggested the package contained something very expensive.

He got into his car and followed her. On a deserted stretch of road he accelerated and pulled her over. Terrified, she thrust the bag at him and begged him to let her go.

As he stood there, beside her Chevy, Fielding realized that he hadn't worn a mask or switched plates on his car. He believed that he'd subconsciously failed to do these things because he wanted to see how he'd feel about killing. Fielding reached into the glove compartment, took out a gun and before she even had time to scream shot her twice.

He climbed back into his car, drove back to Juice 'n' Java and had another cappuccino. Ironically, he'd mused, many criminals don't kill. They're afraid to because they think they'll be more likely to be caught. In fact, if they do kill they'll be more likely to get away.

Still, police can be good and he was arrested several times. He was released in all those cases except one. In Florida he was collared for armed robbery and the evidence against him was strong. But he had a good lawyer, who got him a reduced sentence on condition that Fielding seek treatment at a mental hospital.

He was dreading the time he had to serve but it turned out to be an astonishing two years. In the Dade City Mental Health Facility, Fielding could taste crime. He could smell it. Many, if not most, of the convicts were there because their lawyers were quick with the insanity defense. Dumb crooks are in prison, smart ones are in hospitals.

After two years and an exemplary appearance before the Medical Review Panel, Fielding returned to Connecticut.

And the first thing he did was get a job as an aide at a hospital for the criminally insane in Hartford.

There he'd met a man named David Hughes, a fascinating creature. Fielding decided he'd probably been a pretty decent fellow until he stabbed his wife to death in a jealous rage on Christmas Day. The stabbing was a dime-a-dozen matter but what was so interesting, though, was what happened after hubby gave Pamela several deep puncture wounds in the lungs. She ran to the closet and found a pistol and, before she died, shot Hughes in the head.

Fielding didn't know what exactly had happened inside Hughes's cranium, neurologically speaking, but-perhaps because the aide was the first person Hughes saw when he awoke after surgery-some kind of odd bonding occurred between the two. Hughes would do whatever Fielding asked. Getting coffee, cleaning up for him, ironing shirts, cooking. It turned out that Hughes would do more than domestic chores, though-as Fielding found out one evening just after night-duty nurse Ruth Miller removed Fielding's hand from between her legs and said, "I'm reporting you, asshole."