Shadowfires (28 page)

“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 questions, 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 continued 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.