Shadowfires

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 and-especially
for a DSA man-woefully prone to look only at the surfaces of people
and events rather than down into more profound levels. Sometimes, in
spite of his training and his important job, 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.
    In 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, though 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. He put down the railing on one side and sat on the edge of the mattress. He took her uninjured left hand, held it in both 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 a year that he was now, he had not yet changed so
much that he could control his