“You're a cop, some kind of cop, you're a public servant,” she said, “you can't treat me—”
“Shut up, honey,” Sharp said. The light from the only lamp fell across his face at an angle, weirdly exaggerating some features while leaving others entirely in shadow, giving his face a deformed look, a demonic aspect. He grinned, and the effect was even more unnerving. “You shut your dirty little mouth and open it only when you're ready to tell me what I want to know.”
The girl gave out a thin, pathetic cry of pain, and tears burst from her eyes. Peake saw that Sharp was squeezing her left hand very hard and grinding the fingers together in his big mitt.
For a while, the girl talked to avoid the torture. She told them about Leben's visit last night, about the way his head was staved in, about how gray and cool his skin had felt.
But when Sharp wanted to know if she had any idea where Eric Leben had gone after leaving the house, she clammed up again, and he said, “Ah, you do have an idea,” and he began to grind her hand again.
Peake felt sick, and he wanted to do something to help the girl, but there was nothing he could do.
Sharp eased up on her hand, and she said, “Please, that was the thing… the thing Mrs. Leben most wanted me not to tell anyone.”
“Now, honey,” Sharp said, “it's stupid for a little whore like you to pretend to have scruples. I don't believe you have any, and you know you don't have any, so cut the act. Save us some time and save yourself a lot of trouble.” He started to grind her hand again, and his other hand slipped down to her throat and then to her breasts, which he touched through the thin material of her hospital gown.
In the shadowed corner, Peake was almost too shocked to breathe, and he wanted to be out of there. He certainly did not want to watch Sarah Kiel be abused and humiliated; however, he could not look away or close his eyes, because Sharp's unexpected behavior was the most morbidly, horrifyingly fascinating thing Peake had ever seen.
He was nowhere near coming to terms with his previous shattering insight, and already he was experiencing yet another major revelation. He'd always thought of policemen — which included DSA agents — as Good Guys with capital Gs, White Hats, Men on White Horses, valiant Knights of the Law, but that image of purity was suddenly unsustainable if a man like Sharp could be a highly regarded member in good standing of that noble fraternity. Oh, sure, Peake knew there were some bad cops, bad agents, but somehow he had always thought the bad ones were caught early in their careers and that they never had a chance of advancing to high positions, that they self-destructed, that slime like that got what was coming to them and got it pretty quickly, too. He believed only virtue was rewarded. Besides, he had always thought he'd be able to smell corruption in another cop, that it would be evident from the moment he laid eyes on the guy. And he had never imagined that a flat-out pervert could hide his sickness and have a successful career in law enforcement. Maybe most men were disabused of such naive ideas long before they were twenty-seven, but it was only now, watching the deputy director behave like a thug, like a regular damn barbarian, that Jerry Peake began to see that the world was painted more in shades of gray than in black and white, and this revelation was so powerful that he could no more have averted his eyes from Sharp's sick performance than he could have looked away from Jesus returning on a chariot of fire through an angel-bedecked sky.
Sharp continued to grind the girl's hand in his, which made her cry harder, and he had a hand on her breasts and was pushing her back hard against the bed, telling her to quiet down, so she was trying to please him now, choking back her tears, but still Sharp squeezed her hand, and Peake was on the verge of making a move, to hell with his career, to hell with his future in the DSA, he couldn't just stand by and watch this brutality, he even took a step toward the bed—
And that was when the door opened wide and The Stone entered the room as if borne on the shaft of light that speared in from the hospital corridor behind him. That was how Jerry Peake thought of the man from the moment he saw him: The Stone.
“What's goin' on here?” The Stone asked in a voice that was quiet, gentle, deep but not real deep, yet commanding.
The guy was not quite six feet tall, maybe five eleven, even five ten, which left him several inches shorter than Anson Sharp, and he was about a hundred and seventy pounds, a good fifty pounds lighter than Sharp. Yet when he stepped through the door, he seemed like the biggest man in the room, and he still seemed like the biggest even when Sharp let go of the girl and stood up from the edge of the bed and said, “Who the hell are you?”
The Stone switched on the overhead fluorescents and stepped farther into the room, letting the door swing shut behind him. Peake pegged the guy as about forty, though his face looked older because it was full of wisdom. He had close-cut dark hair, sun-weathered skin, and solid features that looked as if they had been jackhammered out of granite. His intense blue eyes were the same shade as those of the girl in the bed but clearer, direct, piercing. When he turned those eyes briefly toward Jerry Peake, Peake wanted to crawl under a bed and hide. The Stone was compact and powerful, and though he was really smaller than Sharp, he appeared infinitely stronger, more formidable, as if he actually weighed every ounce as much as Sharp but had compressed his tissues into an unnatural density.
“Please leave the room and wait for me in the hall,” said The Stone quietly.
Astonished, Sharp took a couple of steps toward him, loomed over him, and said, “I asked you who the hell you are.”
The Stone's hands and wrists were much too large for the rest of him: long, thick fingers; big knuckles; every tendon and vein and sinew stood out sharply, as if they were hands carved in marble by a sculptor with an exaggerated appreciation for detail. Peake sensed that they were not quite the hands that The Stone had been born with, that they had grown larger and stronger in response to day after day of long, hard, manual labor. The Stone looked as if he thrived on the kind of heavy work that was done in a foundry or quarry or, considering his sun-darkened skin, a farm. But not one of those big, easy, modern farms with a thousand machines and an abundant supply of cheap field hands. No, if he had a farm, he had started it with little money, with bad rocky land, and he had endured lousy weather and sundry catastrophes to bring fruit from the reluctant earth, building a successful enterprise by the expenditure of much sweat, blood, time, hopes, and dreams, because the strength of all those successfully waged struggles was in his face and hands.
“I'm her father, Felsen Kiel,” The Stone told Sharp.
In a small voice devoid of fear and filled with wonder, Sarah Kiel said, “Daddy…”
The Stone started past Sharp, toward his daughter, who had sat up in bed and held out a hand toward him.
Sharp stepped in his way, leaned close to him, loomed over him, and said, “You can see her when we've finished the interrogation.”
The Stone looked up at Sharp with a placid expression that was the essence of equanimity and imperturbability, and Peake was not only gladdened but thrilled to see that Sharp was not going to intimidate this man. “Interrogate? What right have you to interrogate?”
Sharp withdrew his wallet from his jacket, opened it to his DSA credentials. “I'm a federal agent, and I am in the middle of an urgent investigation concerning a matter of national security. Your daughter has information that I've got to obtain as soon as possible, and she is being less than cooperative.”
“If you'll step into the hall,” The Stone said quietly, “I'll speak with her. I'm sure she isn't obstructin' you on purpose. She's a troubled girl, yes, and she's allowed herself to be misguided, but she's never been bad at heart or spiteful. I'll speak to her, find out what you need to know, then convey the information to you.”