levels. Sometimes, in spite of his training and his importantjob 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.
n 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,
hough 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. Me put down
the railing on one side and sat on the edge of the mattress. He took
her uninjured left hand, held it in beth 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