“Please leave the room and wait for me in the hall,” said The Stone quietly.
Astonished, Sharp took a couple of steps toward him, loomed over him, and said, “I asked you who the hell you are.”
The Stone's hands and wrists were much too large for the rest of him: long, thick fingers; big knuckles; every tendon and vein and sinew stood out sharply, as if they were hands carved in marble by a sculptor with an exaggerated appreciation for detail. Peake sensed that they were not quite the hands that The Stone had been born with, that they had grown larger and stronger in response to day after day of long, hard, manual labor. The Stone looked as if he thrived on the kind of heavy work that was done in a foundry or quarry or, considering his sun-darkened skin, a farm. But not one of those big, easy, modern farms with a thousand machines and an abundant supply of cheap field hands. No, if he had a farm, he had started it with little money, with bad rocky land, and he had endured lousy weather and sundry catastrophes to bring fruit from the reluctant earth, building a successful enterprise by the expenditure of much sweat, blood, time, hopes, and dreams, because the strength of all those successfully waged struggles was in his face and hands.
“I'm her father, Felsen Kiel,” The Stone told Sharp.
In a small voice devoid of fear and filled with wonder, Sarah Kiel said, “Daddy…”
The Stone started past Sharp, toward his daughter, who had sat up in bed and held out a hand toward him.
Sharp stepped in his way, leaned close to him, loomed over him, and said, “You can see her when we've finished the interrogation.”
The Stone looked up at Sharp with a placid expression that was the essence of equanimity and imperturbability, and Peake was not only gladdened but thrilled to see that Sharp was not going to intimidate this man. “Interrogate? What right have you to interrogate?”
Sharp withdrew his wallet from his jacket, opened it to his DSA credentials. “I'm a federal agent, and I am in the middle of an urgent investigation concerning a matter of national security. Your daughter has information that I've got to obtain as soon as possible, and she is being less than cooperative.”
“If you'll step into the hall,” The Stone said quietly, “I'll speak with her. I'm sure she isn't obstructin' you on purpose. She's a troubled girl, yes, and she's allowed herself to be misguided, but she's never been bad at heart or spiteful. I'll speak to her, find out what you need to know, then convey the information to you.”
“No,” Sharp said. “You'll go into the hall and wait.”
“Please move out of my way,” The Stone said.
“Listen, mister,” Sharp said, moving right up against The Stone, glaring down at him, “if you want trouble from me, you'll get it, more than you can deal with. You obstruct a federal agent, and you're just about giving him a license to come down on you as hard as he wants.”
Having read the name on the DSA credentials, The Stone said, “Mr. Sharp, last night I was awakened by a call from a Mrs. Leben, who said my daughter needed me. That's a message I've been waitin' a long time to hear. It's the growin' season, a busy time—”
The guy was a farmer, by God, which gave Peake new confidence in his powers of observation. In spit-polished city shoes, polyester pants, and starched white shirt, The Stone had the uncomfortable look specific to a simple country man who has been forced by circumstances to exchange his work clothes for unfamiliar duds.
“—a very busy season. But I got dressed the moment I hung up the phone, drove the pickup a hundred miles to Kansas City in the heart of the night, got the dawn flight out to Los Angeles, then the connector flight here to Palm Springs, a taxi—”
“Your travel journal doesn't interest me one damn bit,” Sharp said, still blocking The Stone.
“Mr. Sharp, I am plain bone-weary, which is the fact I'm tryin' to impress upon you, and I am most eager to see my girl, and from the looks of her she's been cryin', which upsets me mightily. Now, though I'm not an angry man by nature, or a trouble-makin' man, I don't know quite what I might do if you keep treatin' me high-handed and try to stop me from seein' what my girl's cryin' about.”
Sharp's face tightened with anger. He stepped back far enough to give himself room to plant one big hand on The Stone's chest.
Peake was not sure whether Sharp intended to guide the man out of the room and into the corridor or give him one hell of a shove back against the wall. He never found out which it was because The Stone put his own hand on Sharp's wrist and bore down and, without seeming to make any effort whatsoever, he removed Sharp's hand from his chest. In fact, he must have put as much painful pressure on Sharp's wrist as Sharp had applied to Sarah's fingers, for the deputy director went pale, the redness of anger draining right out of him, and a queer look passed through his eyes.
Letting go of Sharp's hand, The Stone said, “I know you're a federal agent, and I have the greatest respect for the law. I know you can see this as obstruction, which would give you a good excuse to knock me on my can and clap me in handcuffs. But I'm of the opinion that it wouldn't do you or your agency the least bit of good if you roughed me up, 'specially since I've told you I'll encourage my daughter to cooperate. What do you think?”
Peake wanted to applaud. He didn't.
Sharp stood there, breathing heavily, trembling, and gradually his rage-clouded eyes cleared, and he shook himself the way a bull sometimes will shake itself back to its senses after unsuccessfully charging a matador's cape. “Okay. I just want to get my information fast. I don't care how. Maybe you'll get it faster than I can.”
“Thank you, Mr. Sharp. Give me half an hour—”
“Five minutes!” Sharp said.
“Well, sir,” The Stone said quietly, “you've got to give me time to say hello to my daughter, time to hug her. I haven't seen her in almost eighteen months. And I need time to get the whole story from her, to find out what sort of trouble she's in. That's got to come first, 'fore I start throwin' questions at her.”
“Half an hour's too damn long,” Sharp said. “We're in pursuit of a man, a dangerous man, and we—”
“If I was to call an attorney to advise my daughter, which is her right as a citizen, it'd take him hours to get here—”
“Half an hour,” Sharp told The Stone, “and not one damn minute more. I'll be in the hall.”
Previously, Peake had discovered that the deputy director was a sadist and a pedophile, which was an important thing to know. Now he had made another discovery about Sharp: The son of a bitch was, at heart, a coward; he might shoot you in the back or sneak up on you and slit your throat, yes, those things seemed within his character, but in a face-to-face confrontation, he would chicken out if the stakes got high enough. And that was an even more important thing to know.
Peake stood for a moment, unable to move, as Sharp went to the door. He could not take his eyes off The Stone.
“Peake!” Sharp said as he pulled the door open.
Finally Peake followed, but he kept glancing back at Felsen Kiel, The Stone. Now there, by God, was a legend.
20
COPS ON SICK LEAVE
Detective Reese Hagerstrom went to bed at four o'clock Tuesday morning, after returning from Mrs. Leben's house in Placentia, and he woke at ten-thirty, unrested because the night had been full of terrible dreams. Glassy-eyed dead bodies in trash dumpsters. Dead women nailed to walls. Many of the nightmares had involved Janet, the wife Reese had lost. In the dreams, she was always clutching the door of the blue Chevy van, the infamous van, and crying, “They've got Esther, they've got Esther!” In every dream, one of the guys in the van shot her exactly as he had shot her in real life, point-blank, and the large-caliber slug pulverized her lovely face, blew it away…
Reese got out of bed and took a very hot shower. He wished that he could unhinge the top of his head and sluice out the hideous images that lingered from the nightmares.
Agnes, his sister, had taped a note on the refrigerator in the kitchen. She had taken Esther to the dentist
for a scheduled checkup.
Standing by the sink, looking out the window at the big coral tree in the rear yard, Reese drank hot black coffee and ate a slightly stale doughnut. If Agnes could see the breakfast he made for himself, she would be upset. But his dreams had left him queasy, and he had no appetite for anything heavier. Even the doughnut was hard to swallow.
“Black coffee and greasy doughnuts,” Agnes would say if she knew. “One'll give you ulcers, other'll clog your arteries with cholesterol. Two slow methods of suicide. You want to commit suicide, I can tell you a hundred quicker and less painful ways to go about it.”
He thanked God for Agnes, in spite of her tendency, as his big sister, to nag him about everything from his eating habits to his taste in neckties. Without her, he might not have held himself together after Janet's death.
Agnes was unfortunately big-boned, stocky, plain-looking, with a deformed left hand, destined for spinsterhood, but she had a kind heart and a mothering instinct second to none. After Janet died, Agnes arrived with a suitcase and her favorite cookbook, announcing that she would take care of Reese and little Esther “just for the summer,” until they were able to cope on their own. As a fifth-grade teacher in Anaheim, she had the summer off and could devote long hours to the patient rebuilding of the shattered Hagerstrom household. She had been with them five years now, and without her, they'd be lost.
Reese even liked her good-natured nagging. When she encouraged him to eat well-balanced meals, he felt cared for and loved.
As he poured another cup of black coffee, he decided to bring Agnes a dozen roses and a box of chocolates when he came home today. He was not, by nature, given to frequent expressions of his feelings, so he tried to compensate now and then by surprising those he cared for with gifts. The smallest surprises thrilled Agnes, even coming from a brother. Big-boned, stocky, plain-faced women were not used to getting gifts when there was no occasion requiring them.
Life was not only unfair but sometimes decidedly cruel. That was not a new thought to Reese. It was not even inspired by Janet's untimely and brutal death — or by the fact that Agnes's warm, loving, generous nature was trapped forever inside a body that most men, too focused on appearances, could never love. As a policeman, frequently confronted by the worst in humankind, he had learned a long time ago that cruelty was the way of the world — and that the only defense against it was the love of one's family and a few close friends.
His closest friend, Julio Verdad, arrived as Reese was pouring a third cup of black coffee. Reese got another cup from the cabinet and filled it for Julio, and they sat at the kitchen table.
Julio looked as if he'd had little sleep, and in fact Reese was probably the only person capable of detecting the subtle signs of overwork in the lieutenant. As usual, Julio was well dressed: smartly tailored dark blue suit, crisp white shirt, perfectly knotted maroon-and-blue tie with gold chain, maroon pocket handkerchief, and oxblood Bally loafers. He was as neat and precise and alert as always, but vague sooty smudges were visible under his eyes, and his soft voice was surely if immeasurably softer than usual.
“Up all night?” Reese asked.
“I slept.”
“How long? An hour or two? That's what I thought. You worry me,” Reese said. “You'll wear yourself down to bone someday.”
“This is a special case.”
“They're all special cases to you.”
“I feel a special obligation to the victim, Ernestina.”
“This is the thousandth victim you've felt a special obligation toward,” Reese noted.
Julio shrugged and sipped his coffee. “Sharp wasn't bluffing.”
“About what?”
“About pulling this out of our hands. The names of the victims — Ernestina Hernandez and Rebecca Klienstad — are still in the files, but only the names. Plus a memorandum indicating that federal authorities requested the case be remanded to their jurisdiction for 'reasons of national security.' This morning, when I pushed Folbeck about letting you and me assist the feds, he came down hard. Said, 'Holy fuckin' Christ, Julio, stay out of it. That's an order.' His very words.”
Folbeck was chief of detectives, a devout Mormon who — could hold his own with the most foulmouthed men in the department but who never took the Lord's name in vain. That was where he drew the line. In spite of his vivid and frequent use of four-letter words, Nicholas Folbeck was capable of angrily lecturing any detective heard to mutter a blasphemy. In fact, he'd once told Reese, “Hagerstrom, please don't say 'goddamn' or 'holy Christ' or anything like that in my presence ever again. I purely hate that shit, and I won't fuckin' tolerate it.” If Nick Folbeck's warning to Julio had included blasphemy as well as mere trash talk, the pressure on the department to stay out of this case had come from higher authorities than Anson Sharp.
Reese said, “What about the file on the body-snatching case, Eric Leben's corpse?”
“Same thing,” Julio said. “Removed from our jurisdiction.”
Business talk had taken Reese's mind off last night's bloody dreams of Janet, and his appetite had returned a little. He got another doughnut from the breadbox. He offered one to Julio, but Julio declined. Reese said, “What else have you been up to?”
“For one thing… I went to the library when it opened and read everything I could find on Dr. Eric Leben.”
“Rich, a scientific genius, a business genius, ruthless, cold, too stupid to know he had a great wife — we already know about him.”
“He was also obsessed,” Julio said.
“I guess geniuses usually are, with one thing or another.”
“What obsessed him was immortality.”
Reese frowned. “Say what?”
“As a graduate student, and in the years immediately following his acquisition of a doctorate, when he was one of the brightest young geneticists doing recombinant DNA research anywhere in the world, he wrote articles for a lot of journals and published research papers dealing with various aspects of the extension of the human life span. A flood of articles; the man is driven.”
“Was driven. Remember that garbage truck,” Reese said.
“Even the driest, most technical of those pieces have a… well, a fire in them, a passion that grips you,” Julio said. He pulled a sheet of paper from one of his inside jacket pockets, unfolded it. “This is a line from an article that appeared in a popular science magazine, more colorful than the technical journal stuff: 'It may be possible, ultimately, for man to reshape himself genetically and thereby deny the claim of the grave, to live longer than Methuselah — and even to be both Jesus and Lazarus in one, raising himself up from the mortuary slab even as death lays him down upon it.”
Reese blinked. “Funny, huh? His body's stolen from the morgue, which is sort of being 'raised up,' though not the way he meant it.”
Julio's eyes were strange. “Maybe not funny. Maybe not stolen.”
Reese felt a strangeness coming into his own eyes. He said, “You don't mean… no, of course not.”
“He was a genius with unlimited resources, perhaps the brightest man ever to work in recombinant DNA research, and he was obsessed with staying young and avoiding death. So when he just seems to get up and walk away from a mortuary… is it so impossible to imagine that he did, in fact, get up and walk away?”
Reese felt his chest tightening, and he was surprised to feel a thrill of fear pass through him. “But is such a thing possible, after the injuries he suffered?”
“A few years ago, definitely impossible. But we're living in an age of miracles, or at least in an age of infinite possibilities.”
“But how?”
“That's part of what we'll have to find out. I called UCI and got in touch with Dr. Easton Solberg, whose work on aging is mentioned in Leben's articles. Turns out Leben knew Solberg, looked up to him as a mentor, and for a while they were fairly close. Solberg has great praise for Leben, says he isn't the least surprised that Leben made a fortune out of DNA research, but Solberg al
so says there was a dark side to Eric Leben. And he's willing to talk about it.”
“What dark side?”
“He wouldn't say on the phone. But we have an appointment with him at UC1 at one o'clock.”
As Julio pushed his chair back and got up, Reese said, “How can we keep digging into this and stay out of trouble with Nick Folbeck?”
“Sick leave,” Julio said. “As long as I'm on sick leave, I'm not officially investigating anything. Call it personal curiosity.”
“That won't hold up if we're caught at it. Cops aren't supposed to have personal curiosity in a situation like this.”
“No, but if I'm on sick leave, Folbeck's not going to be worrying about what I'm doing. It's less likely that anyone'll be looking over my shoulder. In fact, I sort of implied that I wanted nothing to do with anything this hot. Told Folbeck that, given the heat on this, it might be best for me to get away for a few days, in case the media pick up on it and want me to answer questions. He agreed.”
Reese got to his feet. “I better call in sick, too.”
“I already did it for you,” Julio said.
“Oh. Okay, then, let's go.”
“I mean, I thought it would be all right. But if you don't want to get involved in this—”
“Julio, I'm in.”
“Only if you're sure.”
“I'm in,” Reese said exasperatedly.
And he thought but did not say: You saved my Esther, my little girl, went right after those guys in the Chevy van and got her out of there alive, you were like a man possessed, they must've thought it was a demon on their tail, you put your own life on the line and saved Esther, and I loved you before that because you were my partner and a good one, but after that I loved you, you crazy little bastard, and as long as I live I'm going to be there when you need me, no matter what.
In spite of his natural difficulty expressing his most profound feelings, Reese wanted to say all of that to Julio, but he kept silent because Julio did not want effusive gratitude and would be embarrassed by it. All Julio wanted was the commitment of a friend and partner. Undying gratitude would, if openly expressed, impose a barrier between them by obviously placing Julio in a superior position, and ever afterward they would be awkward with each other.
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