Shadowfires. By: Dean R. Koontz

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 D.S.A, 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 andspecially for a D.S.A man-woefully prone to look only at

the surfaces of people and events rather than down into more profound

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