Sharp took advantage of that weak spot. In a discreet session with Alma Dunn in the nurses' lounge, with only Peake as a witness, Sharp subtly threatened the woman with a very public reopening of the original investigation, this time at the federal level, and not only solicited her cooperation but brought her almost to tears, a feat that Peake — who likened Alma Dunn to Agatha Christie's indomitable Miss Jane Marple — had thought impossible.
At first, it appeared as if Dr. Werfell would be more difficult to crack. His record as a physician was unblemished. He was highly regarded in the medical community, possessed an AMA Physician of the Year Award, contributed six hours a week of his time to a free clinic for the disadvantaged, and from every angle appeared to be a saint. Well… from every angle but one: He had been charged with income-tax evasion five years ago and had lost in court on a technicality. He had failed to comply precisely with IRS standards of record keeping, and though his failure was unintentional, a simple ignorance of the law, ignorance of the law was not an acceptable defense.
Cornering Werfell in a two-bed room currently unoccupied by patients, Sharp used the threat of a new IRS investigation to bring the doctor to his knees in about five minutes flat. Werfell seemed certain that his records would be found acceptable now and that he would be cleared, but he also knew how expensive and time-consuming it was to defend himself against an IRS probe, and he knew that his reputation would be tarnished even when he was cleared. He looked to Peake for sympathy a few times, knowing he would get none from Sharp, but Peake did his best to imitate Anson Sharp's air of granite resolution and indifference to others. Being an intelligent man, Werfell quickly determined that the prudent course would be to do as Sharp wished in order to avoid another tax-court nightmare, even if it meant bending his principles in the matter of Sarah Kiel.
“No reason to fault yourself or lose any sleep over a misguided concern about professional ethics, Doctor,” Sharp said, clapping one beefy hand on the physician's shoulder in a gesture of reassurance, suddenly friendly and empathetic now that Werfell had broken. “The welfare of our country comes before anything else. No one would dispute that or think you'd made the wrong decision.”
Dr. Werfell did not exactly recoil from Sharp's touch, but he looked sickened by it. His expression did not change when he looked from Sharp to Jerry Peake.
Peake winced.
Werfell led them out of the untenanted room, down the hospital corridor, past the nurses' station — where Alma Dunn watched them warily while pretending not to look — to the private room where Sarah Kiel remained sedated. As they went, Peake noticed that Werfell, who had previously seemed to resemble Dashiell Hammett and who had looked tremendously imposing, was now somewhat shrunken, diminished. His face was gray, and he seemed older than he had been just a short while ago.
Although Peake admired Anson Sharp's ability to command and to get things done, he did not see how he could adopt his boss's methods as his own. Peake wanted not only to be a successful agent but to be a legend, and you could be a legend only if you played fair and still got things done. Being infamous was not at all the same as being a legend, and in fact the two could not coexist. If he had learned nothing else from five thousand mystery novels, Peake had at least learned that much.
Sarah Kiel's room was silent except for her slow and slightly wheezy breathing, dark but for a single softly glowing lamp beside her bed and the few thin beams of bright desert sun that burned through at the edges of the heavy drapes drawn over the lone window.
The three men gathered around the bed, Dr. Werfell and Sharp on one side, Peake on the other.
“Sarah,” Werfell said quietly. “Sarah?” When she didn't respond, the physician repeated her name and gently shook her shoulder.
She snorted, murmured, but did not wake.
Werfell lifted one of the girl's eyelids, studied her pupil, then held her wrist and timed her pulse. “She won't wake naturally for… oh, perhaps another hour.”
“Then do what's necessary to wake her now,” Anson Sharp said impatiently. “We've already discussed this.”
“I'll administer an injection to counteract,” Werfell said, heading toward the closed door.
“Stay here,” Sharp said. He indicated the call button on the cord that was tied loosely to one of the bed rails. “Have a nurse bring what you need.”
“This is questionable treatment,” Werfell said. “I won't ask any nurse to be involved in it.” He went out, and the door sighed slowly shut behind him.
Looking down at the sleeping girl, Sharp said, “Scrumptious.”
Peake blinked in surprise.
“Tasty,” Sharp said, without raising his eyes from the girl.
Peake looked down at the unconscious teenager and tried to see something scrumptious and tasty about her, but it wasn't easy. Her blond hair was tangled and oily because she was perspiring in her drugged sleep, her limp and matted tresses were unappealingly sweat-pasted to forehead, cheeks, and neck. Her right eye was blackened and swollen shut, with several lines of dried and crusted blood radiating from it where the skin had been cracked and torn. Her right cheek was covered by a bruise from the corner of her swollen eye all the way to her jaw, and her upper lip was split and puffy. Sheets covered her almost to the neck, except for her thin right arm, which had to be exposed because one broken finger was in a cast; two fingernails had been cracked off at the cuticle, and the hand looked less like a hand than like a bird's long-toed, bony claw.
“Fifteen when she first moved in with Leben,” Sharp said softly. “Not much past sixteen now.”
Turning his attention from the sleeping girl to his boss, Jerry Peake studied Sharp as Sharp studied Sarah Kiel, and he was not merely struck by an incredible insight but whacked by it so hard he almost reeled backward. Anson Sharp, deputy director of the DSA, was both a pedophile and a sadist.
Perverse hungers were apparent in the man's hard green eyes and predatory expression. Clearly, he thought Sarah was scrumptious and tasty not because she looked so great right now but because she was only sixteen and badly battered. His rapturous gaze moved lovingly over her blackened eye and bruises, which obviously had as great an erotic impact upon him as breasts and buttocks might have upon a normal man. He was a tightly controlled sadist, yes, and a pedophile who kept his sick libido in check, a pervert who had redirected his mutant needs into wholly acceptable channels, into the aggressiveness and ambition that had swiftly carried him almost to the top of the agency, but a sadist and a pedophile nonetheless.
Peake was as astonished as he was appalled. And his astonishment arose not only from this terrible insight into Sharp's character but from the very fact that he'd had such an insight in the first place. Although he wanted to be a legend, Jerry Peake knew that, even for twenty-seven, he was naive and — especially for a DSA man — woefully prone to look only at the surfaces of people and events rather than down into more profound levels. Sometimes, in spite of his training and his important job, he felt as if he were still a boy, or at least as if the boy in him were still too much a part of his character. Now, staring at Anson Sharp as Sharp hungered for Sarah Kiel, absolutely walloped by this insight, Jerry Peake was suddenly exhilarated. He wondered if it was possible to finally begin to grow up even as late as twenty-seven.
Anson Sharp was staring at the girl's torn and broken hand, his green eyes radiant, a vague smile playing at the corners of his mouth.
With a thump and swish that startled Peake, the door to the room opened, and Dr. Werfell returned. Sharp blinked and shook himself as if coming out of a mild trance, stepped back, and watched as Werfell raised the bed, bared Sarah's left arm, and administered an injection to counteract the effect of the two sedatives she had taken.
In a couple of minutes, the girl was awake, relatively aware, but confused. She could not remember where she was, how she had gotten there, or why she was so battered and in pain. She kept asking who Werfell, Sharp, and Peake were, and Werfell patiently answered all her qu
estions, but mostly he monitored her pulse and listened to her heart and peered into her eyes with a lighted instrument.
Anson Sharp grew impatient with the girl's slow ascension from her drugged haze. “Did you give her a large enough dose to counteract the sedative or did you hedge it, Doctor?”
“This takes time,” Werfell said coldly.
“We don't have time,” Sharp said.
A moment later, Sarah Kiel stopped asking questions, gasped in shock at the sudden return of her memory, and said, “Eric!”
Peake would not have imagined that her face could go paler than it was already, but it did. She began to shiver.
Sharp returned swiftly to the bed. “That'll be all, Doctor.”
Werfell frowned. “What do you mean?”
“I mean she's alert now, and we can question her, and you can get out and leave us to it. Clear?”
Dr. Werfell insisted he should stay with his patient in case she had a delayed reaction to the injection. Sharp became more adamant, invoking his federal authority. Werfell relented but moved toward the window to open the drapes first. Sharp told him to leave them closed, and Werfell went to the light switch for the overhead fluorescents, but Sharp told him to leave them off. “The bright light will hurt the poor girl's eyes,” Sharp said, though his sudden concern for Sarah was transparently insincere.
Peake had the uncomfortable feeling that Sharp intended to be hard on the girl, frighten her half to death, whether or not that approach was necessary. Even if she told them everything they wanted to know, the deputy director was going to terrorize her for the sheer fun of it. He probably viewed mental and emotional abuse as being at least partially satisfying and socially acceptable alternatives to the things he really wanted to do: beat her and fuck her. The bastard wanted to keep the room as dark as possible because shadows would contribute to the mood of menace that he intended to create.
When Werfell left the room, Sharp went to the girl's bed. He put down the railing on one side and sat on the edge of the mattress. He took her uninjured left hand, held it in both his hands, gave it a reassuring squeeze, smiled down at her, and as he spoke he began to slide one of his huge hands up and down her slender arm, even all the way up under the short sleeve of her hospital gown, slowly up and down, which was not at all reassuring but provocative.
Peake stepped back into a corner of the room, where shadows sheltered him, partly because he knew he would not be expected to ask questions of the girl, but also because he did not want Sharp to see his face. Although he had achieved the first startling insight of his life and was gripped by the heady feeling that he was not going to be the same man in a year that he was now, he had not yet changed so much that he could control his expressions or conceal his disgust.
“I can't talk about it,” Sarah Kiel told Sharp, watching him warily and shrinking back from him as far as she could. “Mrs. Leben told me not to tell anyone anything.”
Still holding her good hand in his left, he raised his right hand, with which he had been stroking her arm, and he gently rubbed his thick knuckles over her smooth, unblemished left cheek. It almost seemed like a gesture of sympathy or affection, but it was not.
He said, “Mrs. Leben is a wanted criminal, Sarah. There's a warrant for her arrest. I had it issued myself. She's wanted for serious violations of the Defense Security Act. She may have stolen defense secrets, may even intend to pass them to the Soviets. Surely you've no desire to protect someone like that. Hmmmmm?”
“She was nice to me,” Sarah said shakily.
Peake saw that the girl was trying to ease away from the hand that stroked her face but was plainly afraid of giving offense to Sharp. Evidently she was not yet certain that he was threatening her. She'd get the idea soon.
She continued: “Mrs. Leben's paying my hospital bills, gave me some money, called my folks. She… she was s-so nice, and she told me not to talk about this, so I won't break my promise to her.”
“How interesting,” Sharp said, putting his hand under her chin and lifting her head to make her look at him with her one good eye. “Interesting that even a little whore like you has some principles.”
Shocked, she said, “I'm no whore. I never—”
“Oh, yes,” Sharp said, gripping her chin now and preventing her from turning her head away. “Maybe you're too thickheaded to see the truth about yourself, or too drugged up, but that's what you are, a little whore, a slut in training, a piglet who's going to grow up to be a fine sweet pig.”
“You can't talk to me like this.”
“Honey, I talk to whores any way I want.”
“You're a cop, some kind of cop, you're a public servant,” she said, “you can't treat me—”
“Shut up, honey,” Sharp said. The light from the only lamp fell across his face at an angle, weirdly exaggerating some features while leaving others entirely in shadow, giving his face a deformed look, a demonic aspect. He grinned, and the effect was even more unnerving. “You shut your dirty little mouth and open it only when you're ready to tell me what I want to know.”
The girl gave out a thin, pathetic cry of pain, and tears burst from her eyes. Peake saw that Sharp was squeezing her left hand very hard and grinding the fingers together in his big mitt.
For a while, the girl talked to avoid the torture. She told them about Leben's visit last night, about the way his head was staved in, about how gray and cool his skin had felt.
But when Sharp wanted to know if she had any idea where Eric Leben had gone after leaving the house, she clammed up again, and he said, “Ah, you do have an idea,” and he began to grind her hand again.
Peake felt sick, and he wanted to do something to help the girl, but there was nothing he could do.
Sharp eased up on her hand, and she said, “Please, that was the thing… the thing Mrs. Leben most wanted me not to tell anyone.”
“Now, honey,” Sharp said, “it's stupid for a little whore like you to pretend to have scruples. I don't believe you have any, and you know you don't have any, so cut the act. Save us some time and save yourself a lot of trouble.” He started to grind her hand again, and his other hand slipped down to her throat and then to her breasts, which he touched through the thin material of her hospital gown.
In the shadowed corner, Peake was almost too shocked to breathe, and he wanted to be out of there. He certainly did not want to watch Sarah Kiel be abused and humiliated; however, he could not look away or close his eyes, because Sharp's unexpected behavior was the most morbidly, horrifyingly fascinating thing Peake had ever seen.
He was nowhere near coming to terms with his previous shattering insight, and already he was experiencing yet another major revelation. He'd always thought of policemen — which included DSA agents — as Good Guys with capital Gs, White Hats, Men on White Horses, valiant Knights of the Law, but that image of purity was suddenly unsustainable if a man like Sharp could be a highly regarded member in good standing of that noble fraternity. Oh, sure, Peake knew there were some bad cops, bad agents, but somehow he had always thought the bad ones were caught early in their careers and that they never had a chance of advancing to high positions, that they self-destructed, that slime like that got what was coming to them and got it pretty quickly, too. He believed only virtue was rewarded. Besides, he had always thought he'd be able to smell corruption in another cop, that it would be evident from the moment he laid eyes on the guy. And he had never imagined that a flat-out pervert could hide his sickness and have a successful career in law enforcement. Maybe most men were disabused of such naive ideas long before they were twenty-seven, but it was only now, watching the deputy director behave like a thug, like a regular damn barbarian, that Jerry Peake began to see that the world was painted more in shades of gray than in black and white, and this revelation was so powerful that he could no more have averted his eyes from Sharp's sick performance than he could have looked away from Jesus returning on a chariot of fire through an angel-bedecked sky.
Sharp co
ntinued to grind the girl's hand in his, which made her cry harder, and he had a hand on her breasts and was pushing her back hard against the bed, telling her to quiet down, so she was trying to please him now, choking back her tears, but still Sharp squeezed her hand, and Peake was on the verge of making a move, to hell with his career, to hell with his future in the DSA, he couldn't just stand by and watch this brutality, he even took a step toward the bed—
And that was when the door opened wide and The Stone entered the room as if borne on the shaft of light that speared in from the hospital corridor behind him. That was how Jerry Peake thought of the man from the moment he saw him: The Stone.
“What's goin' on here?” The Stone asked in a voice that was quiet, gentle, deep but not real deep, yet commanding.
The guy was not quite six feet tall, maybe five eleven, even five ten, which left him several inches shorter than Anson Sharp, and he was about a hundred and seventy pounds, a good fifty pounds lighter than Sharp. Yet when he stepped through the door, he seemed like the biggest man in the room, and he still seemed like the biggest even when Sharp let go of the girl and stood up from the edge of the bed and said, “Who the hell are you?”
The Stone switched on the overhead fluorescents and stepped farther into the room, letting the door swing shut behind him. Peake pegged the guy as about forty, though his face looked older because it was full of wisdom. He had close-cut dark hair, sun-weathered skin, and solid features that looked as if they had been jackhammered out of granite. His intense blue eyes were the same shade as those of the girl in the bed but clearer, direct, piercing. When he turned those eyes briefly toward Jerry Peake, Peake wanted to crawl under a bed and hide. The Stone was compact and powerful, and though he was really smaller than Sharp, he appeared infinitely stronger, more formidable, as if he actually weighed every ounce as much as Sharp but had compressed his tissues into an unnatural density.
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