face, eager to waste the son of a bitch.
Jerry Peake, the young D.S.A agent assigned by Anson Sharp to find Sarah
Kiel, carefully searched for a freshly dug grave on Eric Leben’s walled
property in Palm Springs. Using a high-intensity flashlight, being
diligent and utterly thorough, Peake tramped through flower beds,
struggled through shrubbery, getting his pant legs damp and his shoes
muddy, but he found nothing suspicious.
He turned on the pool lights, half expecting to find a dead woman either
floating therer weighted to the blue bottom and peering up through
chlorine-treated water. When the pool proved to be free of corpses,
Peake decided he had been reading too many mystery novels, in mystery
novels, swimming pools were always full of bodies, but never in real
life.
A passionate fan of mystery fiction since he was twelve, Jerry Peake had
never wanted to be anything other than a detective, and not just an
ordinary detective but something special, like a CIA or FBI or D.S.A
man, and not just an ordinary D.S.A man but an investigative genius of
the sort that John Le Carr6, William F. Buckley, or Frederick Forsythe
might write about. Peake wanted to be a legend in his own time. He was
only in his fifth year with the D.S.A, and his reputation as a whiz was
nonexistent, but he was not worried. He had patience.
No one became a legend in just five years. First, you had to spend a
lot of hours doing dog’s work-like tramping through flower beds,
snagging your best suits on thorny shrubbery, and peering hopefully into
swimming pools in the dead of night.
When he did not turn up Sarah Kiel’s body on the Leben property, Peake
made the rounds of the hospitals, hoping to find her name on a patient
roster or on a list of recently treated outpatients. He had no luck at
his first two stops. Worse, even though he had his D.S.A credentials,
complete with photograph, the nurses and physicians with whom he spoke
seemed to regard him with skepticism. They cooperated, but guardedly,
as if they thought he might be an imposter with hidden-and none too
admirable-intentions.
He knew he looked too young to be a D.S.A agent, he was cursed with a
frustratingly fresh, open face. And he was less aggressive in his
questioning than he should be.
But this time, he was sure the problem was not his baby face or slightly
hesitant manner. Instead, he was greeted with doubt because of his
muddy shoes, which he had cleaned with paper towels but which remained
smearylooking. And because of his trouser legs, Having gotten wet, the
material had dried baggy and wrinkled. You could not be taken
seriously, be respected, or become a legend if you looked as if you’d
just slopped pigs.
An hour after dawn, at the third hospital, Desert General, he hit pay
dirt in spite of his sartorial inadequacies.
Sarah Kiel had been admitted for treatment during the night. She was
still a patient.
The head nurse, Alma Dunn, was a sturdy white-haired woman of about
fifty-five, unimpressed with Peake’s credentials and incapable of being
intimidated. After checking on Sarah Kiel, she returned to the nurses
station, where she’d made Peake wait, and she said, “The poor girl’s
still sleeping. She was . . . sedated only a few hours ago, so, I
don’t expect she’ll be awake for another few hours.
“Wake her, please. This is an urgent national security matter.”
“I’ll do no such thing,” Nurse Dunn said. “The girl was hurt. She
needs her rest. You’ll have to wait.”
“Then I’ll wait in her room.
Nurse Dunn’s jaw muscles bulged, and her merry blue eyes turned cold.
“You certainly will not. You’ll wait in the visitors’ lounge.”
Peake knew he would get nowhere with Alma Dunn because she looked like
Jane Marple, Agatha Christie’s indomitable amateur detective, and no one
who looked like Miss Marple would be intimidated. “Listen, if you re
going to be uncooperative, l’ll have to talk to your superior.”
“That’s fine with me,” she said, glancing down disapprovingly at his
shoes. “I’ll get Dr. Werfell.”
Beneath the earth in Riverside, Anson Sharp slept for one hour on the