The Devils Teardrop

log-in time?”
    He was crying hard now. “Twelve twenty-one.”
    “When’s the next time you have to log in?”
    “One-oh-seven.”
    Hardy glanced at the clock on the wall. He nodded.
    Panic in his voice, the young agent continued. “On holidays we use a pattern of increasing intervals, so after the second log-in we—”
    “That’s all right,” Hardy reassured the agent then shot him twice in the head and pushed the button to release the door.
    * * *
    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 lustfor 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 thatmimicked a positive test for botulism (though he never picked up the money at