Rogers seemed determined to take the point. "So I figure the woman's basically on the up and up, although I very much doubt that they got out of the car the way she tells it."
Winters made an effort to hold his own. "I was wondering if they'd been drinking."
Rogers regarded him coldly. "It's possible, but there were an awful lot of other officers in the area. They'd have to be pretty stupid."
"It's hardly an act of intelligence to get blown away with your own gun." Winters realized that without really intending to he had opened hostilities.
Thomas ignored what was going on between the other two. "Do we have the crime scene report?"
Rogers was way ahead of Winters. "I got it from the PD. Needless to say, they fouled it up. In the excitement, the bodies were moved before the whole thing was put on tape, so there's no hard evidence to either support or break down her story. Two cops are dead, four rioters are dead, and she's alive."
"So what do we do, sweat her on the details and hope she cracks?"
Rogers picked an invisible piece of lint from his suit. "I think we'd be wise to look at the big picture. We can turn up the heat initially, but unless she cracks and confesses that she went to the vacant lot to gang-bang the two officers, I figure we give her a clean bill of health and turn her over to the PR people to make her into a heroine. Jesus knows we could use one."
"Do the media have this yet?"
"There's a freeze on it until we come up with our findings."
Winters wondered if Rogers was laying some kind of elaborate trap. "You're saying that if we don't find something obviously wrong, we make her a media star and all look good in the bargain."
Rogers smiled. "You have something against looking good?"
"Not in the least."
"Then shall we go in and talk to her?"
Cynthia Kline was sitting in an upright wooden chair. She looked a little nervous but was otherwise calm and collected. Her fair hair was twisted back into a tight bun, and her uniform was pressed and neat. She looked more like a job applicant on an interview than a traumatized victim. There were three chairs facing her, already set up for the three deacons. They seated themselves. Thomas started the interrogation.
"We are here to ask you a few questions."
"I realize that."
"If you've been telling the truth up to now you have nothing to worry about."
"I've been telling the truth."
Winters caught himself staring. She was really something. She was like one of those late-show movie idols. He tried to put a name to the face. Did she remind him of Grace Kelly? There was something more earthy about her than Grace Kelly. Kathleen Turner? Of course, Kathleen Turner's earlier films had been proscribed. She had even worked with the heretic Russell. Winters found that he was drifting to the dark fantasies. His mind scrabbled for a question, any question. It came out as a blurt.
"Had you been drinking?"
Rogers and Thompson both looked sharply at Winters. He immediately realized that the question was quite inappropriate. He was behaving like an idiot.
Kline shook her head. "I was on my way home."
Rogers moved in to put things back on course. "Perhaps you'd like to tell the story in your own words."
Nobody interrupted as Kline, slowly and carefully, told her story. It matched exactly with the recorded statement. That bothered Winters. She should not have been that calm. The cornerstone of the official philosophy was that women were to be protected. Kline seemed in no need of any protection whatsoever. His Midwest deacon instinct smelled heresy. He could not however, work out why. He framed his next question more carefully.
"Please go into a little more detail as to how you came to get into a police car when you were on the way home from work."
"As I already said, mass transit was halted because of the emergency. I'd resigned myself to walking when the two officers pulled over and offered me a ride."
"Fuchs and Burger?"
"I didn't know their names until afterward."
"Do you often take rides with PD officers, Auxiliary Kline?"
"This was the first time."
"But you did get into a car with two strange men?"
"It was better than walking nearly forty blocks. It had been a bad day, what with the riot on top of the bombing."
"You didn't feel that you were in any danger?"
"These were peace officers in an armored cruiser. It was a lot safer than being out on the street, on foot, in a riot."
"You trust PD officers?"
"If you can't trust the guardians of a Christian society, who can you trust?"
"We ask the questions here, Kline." The by-the-book innocence just did not fit.
Rogers picked up the ball. "But after you accepted the ride, you decided that it might be fun to see the riot area from the back of a PD cruiser."
"Quite the reverse. I was very tired and wanted to be home as soon as possible. It was the officers who insisted on giving me the tour."
"Why should they do that?"
She hesitated. "I think they were trying to show off their… virility."
"And on this tour you ran into the fatal incident."
"That's right."
Thomas started on a very different course. "You seem to have had alarmingly fast reactions during this incident."
"I don't know. When I saw the two officers go down, I thought they were going to kill me next. I didn't want to die."
"Even in the sure and certain knowledge of the resurrection?"
"I didn't want to die."
"Clerical auxiliaries aren't trained in the use of the Remington Controller, are they?"
"We only train with handguns. Strictly for our own protection."
"How did you manage to fire the officer's riot gun so swiftly if you had never handled one?"
"I had two brothers who were both hunters. They taught me to fire most kinds of weapons."
Rogers was actually smiling. He was clearly imagining her talking about her hunting, shooting brothers on TV. His face fell at Thomas' next question.
"Your brothers owned state-of-the-art riot guns?"
"No, but when I grabbed the gun, I found that it fired just like any autoload."
Thomas leaned back in his chair.' "There are other places that teach people how to fire weapons, sophisticated weapons they'd normally have no reason to know about."
For the first time, Cynthia Kline looked less than confident. She said nothing.
Thomas leaned forward. "Perhaps in a terrorist training camp?"
Kline looked frightened. That response was, however, understandable. The word 'terrorist' could strike fear into the totally blameless. Rogers was looking at Thomas as if he had gone mad. At that moment, the phone on the wall rang. Rogers grabbed for it. He listened for almost a minute with an expression of increasing shock. Finally he nodded and hung up. Winters and Thomas looked at him expectantly. Rogers shook his head.
"Three deacons have just been killed. Right out in broad daylight. Bickerton, Baum, and Kinney."
"From the Zealots?"
"Bickerton, Baum, and Kinney. From the Zealots. We're instructed to term this interview and join our respective teams. It's a redline flap."
"Where did it happen?"
"On First Avenue. Between Fourteenth and Fifteenth. They were taken out with a burst of heatseekers, probably fired from a point-six-oh Mossberg."
"We're the only ones who're supposed to have smart ammunition."
"That's the weird part. "
Thomas sighed. "If they were on Fifteenth and First, we know where they'd been. Probably all night."
Rogers quickly motioned to Kline, indicating that no more should be said in front of her. Winters glanced at him.