The Professor heard the hum of a mosquito, the only sound in the silent museum. He removed the circle of glass he had cut in the cabinet and reached inside for the diamond tiara. As he did so, he felt a pinch on his hand. It was the mosquito. He swatted at it with his other hand and squashed it. Good.
He removed the tiara and stared at it. It was the most valuable object in the museum, and one of the most valuable in all of London. He put it in his bag and then left the museum as silently as he had arrived.
Back at home, the Professor inspected the tiara, imagining the reaction of the Detective to news of yet another burglary. It was the ultimate revenge. He and the Detective had been rivals at the police academy, both brilliant students. But the Detective had always ridiculed him for being “too academic.” He said he didn’t have the practical ability to be a police officer, and the worst thing was that he was right.
After a brief period with the police force, the Professor had left to devote himself to forensic science. And when he encountered the Detective at a conference a few years later, his old rival, after a few drinks at the bar, had said to him, “Oh well, old friend, you know what they say: ‘Those who can, do; those who can’t, teach.’”
It was this one comment that had motivated the Professor to do what he did next, which was to make practical use of his forensic expertise by becoming Britain’s most elusive cat burglar. He had begun by burglarizing private homes before advancing to banks and museums. And he really was elusive. The media called him ‘The Clean Cat’ because he never left behind a trace of DNA or other evidence. And now it was the Detective, an important official with the London police, who was being ridiculed for not solving his crimes.
The Detective probably suspected that the criminal was someone with police training because of his understanding of security systems and DNA evidence, but then again, thanks to the many popular crime shows, almost anyone could become an expert these days!
After putting the diamond tiara with the rest of his loot, the Professor removed his black latex suit. The suit covered him from head to toe, impeding any DNA contamination. He considered it his superhero costume, because when he put it on, he transformed from a modest professor into the type of criminal people secretly admired.
While removing his latex gloves, the Professor saw the red mark on his hand where the mosquito had bitten him. He scratched at it absent-mindedly while wiping down the suit with a mixture of alcohol and other chemicals, and then putting it inside an airtight bag.
Later in bed, as he became sleepy, the Professor imagined the mosquito sucking his blood and then injecting him with its saliva, exchanging bodily fluids with him. Disgusting! At least he had killed it, leaving its tiny dead body in the cabinet where the diamond tiara had been, a souvenir for the Detective…
The Professor jolted awake and sat up in bed. The mosquito! He’d left behind the body of the mosquito! The mosquito that had sucked his blood! His blood containing his DNA!
The Detective would send the mosquito to the lab for testing, and when he got the results, he would compare them to the DNA of every known criminal and everyone who’d worked in the police force, including him.
The Professor thought about leaving the country, but he knew that it was almost impossible to hide from the police these days. So instead, he destroyed all of his loot except the diamond tiara and invented a story: he would say that he wanted to help capture The Clean Cat, so in a moment of madness, had decided to replicate his crime. The Detective would have no evidence that he had committed the other burglaries, so wouldn’t be able to arrest him for them.
The Professor waited for the Detective to come and get him. He waited and waited, for days, then weeks, then months, then years, as the Detective advanced in his career to become the city’s police chief, the unsolved burglaries long forgotten.
The Professor often considered putting on his latex suit again and going out into the night, but then he thought of the mosquito, which he imagined lying in a lab somewhere waiting to be tested.
He was an old man now, imagining the life he might have had — had he continued his burglaries, sold his loot and retired to a tropical island — when he took out the latex suit for the first time since that ill-fated night, to put it on one last time. As he put on the gloves, he saw a stain on the back of one of them. It was the dead mosquito, preserved for all these years by the alcohol mixture, sucking out of him the life of crime and luxury he might have had.