The Devils Teardrop

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 realize 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 ina 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.”
    A worried Fielding had muttered to Hughes, “That Ruth Miller. Somebody ought to kill that bitch.”
    And Hughes had said, “Hmmm, okay.”
    “What?” Fielding had asked.
    “Hmmm, okay.”
    “You’d kill her for me?”
    “Uhm. I . . . sure.”
    Fielding took him for a walk on the grounds of the hospital. They