their intentions merely by surveying the research they farmed out to
other companies and extrapolating the purpose of it all.
These civilian types just could not understand that when you bargained
with Uncle Sam and eagerly took his money, you couldn’t sell only a
small piece of your soul. You had to sell it all.
Anson Sharp usually enjoyed bringing that bit of nasty news to people
l!ke Eric Leben. They thought they were such big fish, but they forgot
that even big fish are eaten by bigger fish, and there was no bigger
fish in the sea than the whale called Washington. Sharp loved to watch
that realization sink in. He relished seeing the self-important
hotshots break into a sweat and quiver. They usually tried to bribe him
or reason with him, and sometimes they begged, but of course he could
not let them off the hook. Even if he could have let them off, he would
not have done it, because he liked nothing more than seeing them squirm
before him.
Dr. Eric Leben and his six cronies had been permitted to proceed
unhampered with their revolutionary research into longevity. But if
they had solved all the problems and achieved a useful breakthrough, the
government would have moved in on them and would have absorbed the
project by one means or another, through the swift declaration of a
national defense emergency.
Now Eric Leben had screwed up everything. He administered the faulty
treatment to himself and then accidentally put it to the test by walking
in front of a damn garbage truck. No one could have anticipated such a
turn of events because the guy had seemed too smart to risk his own
genetic integnty.
Looking at the broken china and the trampled food that littered the
floor, Gosser wrinkled his choirboy face and said, “The guy’s a real
berserker.”
“Looks like the work of an animal,” Peake said, frowning.
Sharp led them out of the kitchen, through the rest of the house,
finally to the master bedroom and bath, where more destruction had been
wrought and where there was also some blood, including a bloody
palmprint on the wall. It was probably Leben’s print, proof that the
dead man, in some strange fashion, lived.
No cadaver could be found in the house, neither Sarah Kiel’s nor anybody
else’s, and Sharp was disappointed.
The nude and crucified woman in Placentia had been unexpected and kinky,
a welcome change from the corpses he usually saw. Victims of guns,
knives, plastique, and the garroting wire were old news to Sharp, he had
seen them in such plenitude over the years that he no longer got a kick
out of them. But he had sure gotten a kick out of that bimbo nailed to
the wall, and he was curious to see what Leben’s deranged and rotting
mind might come up with next.
Sharp checked the hidden safe in the floor of the bedroom closet and
found that it had been emptied.
Leaving Gosser behind to house-sit in case Leben returned, Sharp took
Peake along on a search of the garage, expecting to find Sarah Kiel’s
body, which they did not. Then he sent Peake into the backyard with a
flashlight to examine the lawn and flower beds for signs of a freshly
dug grave, though it seemed unlikely that Leben, in his current
condition, would have the desire or the foresight to bury his victims
and cover his tracks.
“If you don’t find anything,” Sharp told Peake, “then start checking the
hospitals. in spite of the blood, maybe the Kiel girl wasn’t killed.
Maybe she run away from him and get medical “If I find her at some
hospital?”
“I’ll need to know at once,” Sharp said, for he would have to prevent
Sarah Kiel from talking about Eric Leben’s return. He would try to use
reason, intimidation, and outright threats to ensure her silence. If
that didn’t work, she would be quietly removed.
Rachael Leben and Ben Shadway also had to be found soon and silenced.
As Peake set out on his assigned tasks-and while Gosser waited alertly
inside the house-Sharp climbed into the unmarked sedan at the curb and