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