The Devil's Teardrop (40 page)

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 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 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.”

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 had a long talk.

A day later Hughes showed up in Fielding’s cubicle, covered with blood, carrying a piece of jagged glass and asking if he could have some soup.

Fielding cleaned him up, thinking he’d been a little careless about the when and where of the murder and about getting away afterward. He decided that Hughes was too good to waste on little things like this and so he
told the man how to escape from the hospital and how to make his way to a nearby cottage that Fielding rented for afternoon trysts with some of the retarded patients.

It was that night that he decided how he could best put the man to use.

Hartford, then Boston, then White Plains, then Philly. Perfect crimes.

And now he was in Washington.

Committing what was turning out to be the
most
perfect crime, he decided (though reflecting that a linguist like Parker Kincaid would be troubled by the unnecessary modifier).

For the last six months he’d spent nearly eighteen hours a day planning the theft. Slowly breaching FBI security—masquerading as young Detective Hardy from the police department’s Research and Statistics Department. (He’d selected his particular pseudonym because studies into the psychological impressions of names reported that “Leonard” was unthreatening and “Hardy” conjured an image of a loyal comrade.) He first infiltrated the Bureau’s District of Columbia field office because that office had jurisdiction over major crimes in the District. He got to know Ron Cohen, the special agent in charge, and his assistants. He learned when SAC Cohen would be on vacation and which of his underlings would be—as the currently in-vogue term went—“primary” on a case of this magnitude. That would be, of course, Margaret Lukas, whose life he invaded as inexorably as he worked his way into the Bureau itself.

He’d camp out in conference rooms, copying voluminous crime statistics for his fictional reports, then would make trips to the vending machines and restrooms, glancing at internal FBI memos and phone books and ID
documentation and procedure manuals. Meanwhile at his home and at his safe house in Gravesend he was spending time cruising the Internet and learning about government facilities, police procedures and security systems (and, yes, Parker, about foreign dialects).

Fielding made hundreds of calls to interior designers who’d worked at FBI headquarters, to the GSA, to former clerks, outside contractors, security specialists, asking innocent questions, talking about phony employee reunions, arguing about imaginary invoices. He usually managed to extract one vital fact—say, about the layout of the headquarters building, the staffing on holidays, the exits and entrances. He learned the brand and general location of security cameras in headquarters. The number and stations of the guards. The communications systems.

He’d spent a month finding the perfect front man—Gilbert Havel, a bum with no criminal record and virtually no recorded past. A man naive enough to think that someone as brilliant as Fielding needed a partner. A man easy to kill.

It was arduous work. But perfection requires patience.

And then, this morning, the Digger shot the hell out of the Metro and Fielding showed up at the Bureau doorstep, eager to help but suitably indignant about being the third wheel on the investigation. Other agents would have double-or triple-checked his credentials, called police headquarters. But not Margaret Lukas, the poor childless widow. Because here was Len Hardy, soon to be a childless widower, racked with the same sorrow she’d struggled through five years ago.

Of
course
she accepted him into the fold without a thought.

And they’d never guessed a thing about him.

Just as he’d figured.

Because Edward Fielding knew that combating crime today is the province of the scientist. Even the psychologists who profiled the criminal mind use formulae to categorize their prey. Yet the perpetrator himself—the human being—is so often overlooked. Oh, he knew that the agents, believing the unsub to be dead, would be concentrating so hard on the extortion note, the linguistics, the handwriting, the trace evidence, and their computer programs and fancy equipment that they’d never see the real mastermind standing—literally—three feet behind them.

He now came to the elevator. The car arrived and he got inside. Fielding didn’t, however, push the seventh-floor button to go to the document lab. He pushed 1b.

The car began to descend.

* * *

The FBI’s evidence room is the largest forensic storage facility in the country.

It’s operated around the clock and usually there’s a staff of two to help the agents log in evidence and sometimes to help them carry the heavier items into the locker area or drive confiscated cars and trucks and even trailered boats into the warehouse connected to the facility.

Tonight, though, there were three agents on duty, a decision made jointly by the deputy director and Margaret Lukas. This was because of the value of a particular item of evidence sitting in the vault at the moment.

But since it was a holiday the two men and the woman were pretty casual. They were lounging around the log-in
window, drinking coffee and talking about basketball. The two men had their backs to the window.

“I
like
Rodman,” said one of the male clerks.

“Oh, puh-lease,” responded the other.

“Hi,” said Edward Fielding, walking up to the window.

“Hey, you hear what happened with that guy on the Mall?” the woman asked him.

“No,” Fielding said and shot her in the head.

The other two died reaching for their weapons. Only one managed to get his Sig-Sauer out of the holster.

Fielding reached through the window, buzzed himself in.

He counted eight video security cameras trained on the window, shelves and vault. But they sent their images to the third-floor Security room, where there was no one left alive to see the perfect crime unfolding.

Fielding lifted the keys from the dead woman’s belt and opened the vault. It was a large room, about twenty by thirty, and was where agents stored drugs and cash taken from heists. In his months of research for the robbery Fielding had learned that prosecutors are obligated to present to the jury the actual cash seized during, say, a drug bust or kidnapping. This was one reason the agents would have brought the ransom money here. The other was something else he’d anticipated—that Mayor Kennedy, whom Fielding had psychologically profiled, would want to keep the cash available in case the Digger contacted him and demanded the ransom after all.

And here it was, the money.

Perfect . . .

Two huge, green canvas satchels. A red tag dangled from each strap. federal evidence. do not remove.

He looked at his watch. He estimated that he’d have twenty minutes before Cage and Kincaid and the other agents returned from the Mall after their shoot-out with the Digger.

Plenty of time. As long as he moved quickly.

Fielding unzipped one bag—it wasn’t locked—and dumped the cash on the floor. The satchel was wired with several homing devices, as he’d known it would be. The money wrappers too, he’d learned from Tobe Geller—a trick he hadn’t anticipated. He wondered if individual bills themselves had been rigged somehow. He doubted it; Geller had never said anything. Still, to make sure, Fielding reached into his pocket and took out a small silver instrument—a Trans-detect, a scanner that could sense the faintest transmission signal of any wavelength, from visual light to infrared to radio waves. He ran this over the pile of cash, just in case the Bureau techs had managed to insert a transmitter into a bill itself. But there were no signals.

Fielding tossed aside the sensor—he had no need for it any longer—and pulled a silk backpack from under his shirt. It was made of parachute material and he’d sewn it himself. He began to pack the money into the bag.

He’d asked for $20,000,000 because that was a credible amount for a scheme like this and also to give some credence to the motive of revenge for a significant event like the Vietnamese War. Fielding, however, would only be able to carry $4,000,000—which would weigh seventy-two pounds. Generally unathletic, he’d worked out at a health club in Bethesda, Maryland, for six weeks after he’d come to the area so that he’d be strong enough to carry the cash.

The hundred-dollar bills were all traceable of course
(tracing money was easy now thanks to scanners and computers). But Fielding had considered that. In Brazil, where he would be in several days, the $4,000,000 in traceable cash would become $3,200,000 in gold. Which would in turn become $3,200,000 in
untraceable
U.S. dollars and eurodollars.

And over the next few years it would easily grow to $4,000,000 once again and then beyond, the mutual fund industry and interest rates willing.

Fielding had no regrets about leaving the rest of the money. Crime can’t be about greed; it must be about craft.