"I think we got it."

"It does look like it."

"Now all we have to do is build the big one."

Mansard made a dismissive gesture. "Just a detail."

Gadd sniffed. "Tell me that on the day."

Winters

"Have you heard about the sub-basement?"

The suspect from Fifteenth Street had stopped being truculent and was becoming genuinely frightened. She inspected her fingernails. They were bloodred and as long as claws. She was avoiding his eyes.

"I've heard about it. There's a few of your buddies who just can't stop talking about it."

"We have our own dungeon down there."

"I said I heard about it."

"It's not one of your fantasy games. It's the real thing down there."

"I said I heard."

"I have the power to send you down there."

The woman looked frantically at the clerical auxiliary who was chaperoning the interrogation. The CA remained stone-faced. The suspect turned back to Winters. "You can't do that to me."

In fact he could not. The instruction had been very simple. The deacons assigned to each of the women brought in from Fifteenth Street were to scare the hell out of them, but there was to be absolutely nothing physical. "If you so much as breathe hard on one of those whores, you're dead. You got that?" Those assigned to the job were all junior deacons. Too many of the senior officers had been regular customers at the house. Dreisler and his headhunters were all over the building. The working girls from the house were rapidly becoming an embarrassment. Even though Dreisler had managed to keep away the media, the matter of the house on Fifteenth Street was still a loose cannon in the department. A cover might have been put on it if the PD had not burst in there first, but, as it was, the thing was so close to being public that the hookers had to be handled with kid gloves. Carlisle was walking around like a man who had the world by the balls, and without a doubt, if the women simply disappeared, he would blow the story to the more hostile elements in the press. The deacons had reacted by falling into a holding pattern. Junior deacons like Winters would keep the women in a state of shock, off balance, and malleable, until some upper echelon decided what to do with them.

"I can do pretty much anything I want with you."

The woman was looking at her nails again. "I want a lawyer."

"This is nothing to do with the law. We aren't policemen. We're the spiritual guardians of society. What happens here is a matter between you, me, and God."

The woman's face twisted. "God?"

"Don't add blasphemy to the rest of your crimes."

Winters was starting to enjoy himself. The woman was small, with black hair, green eyes, and spectacular breasts. Although she had been in the Astor Place complex for close to half a day, she had not been allowed to change out of her working clothes. She was still half-naked in a leather twopiece, black latex stockings, and alarmingly high heels. It was extremely exciting to have even illusionary total power over a creature who, in almost any other context, would have completely intimidated him. In the interrogation room, the costume put her at a positive disadvantage. She kept shifting around in the hard, high-backed chair as if trying to hide or protect her considerable expanses of bare flesh. A bluebird was tattooed on the outside of her left thigh. She caught Winters looking at it and covered it with her hand.

"I don't understand why you're doing this. I haven't done anything. I haven't committed any crimes."

"You're a first-degree common harlot. That, on its own, would be worth a year in Joshua."

"This is ridiculous. We were working for the goddamn deacons. We had a deal and we kept up our end of it."

"You had a deal until three of us were murdered coming out of that place."

"That was nothing to do with any of the girls."

"We don't know that. It's quite possible that any of you could have been working with the terrorists."

"That's impossible. The place was bugged from top to bottom. You couldn't get away with anything. I already told the PDs and now I'm telling you. Me and the rest of the girls were there for one purpose and one purpose only."

"The unclean lusts of the flesh?"

"Money. We were making money and keeping out of trouble."

"I suppose you have some suitably pathetic sob story about how you first became a fallen flower."

"You don't need a sob story when unemployment's at thirty percent. I come from Bangor, Maine, Mr. Deacon. You know what they get up to up there? Those bastards passed a city ordinance that prescribed branding for fornicators."

"Some areas are more zealous than others when it comes to the Lord's work."

Winters was staring at the suspect's breasts and thinking about fornication and branding. The woman went on talking.

"So I get down to New York and I find that there ain't any more jobs down here. My second night, I get picked up on Tenth Avenue and instead of getting busted, I get recruited."

"You saying that society made you a slut?"

"What gives you the right to judge me?"

"Just doing my job."

Anger was taking over from the woman's fear. "You're really enjoying this, aren't you?"

Winters was, but he could not admit it. It was as if the woman knew all about his sexual stirrings. She was leaning forward in her seat.

"You can call me what you like, but you'd better remember how well I know you guys. I'm an expert in all your dirty little urges." She half smiled. "You're getting hot right now, aren't you?"

Winters avoided her eyes. The more she talked, the worse the images in his head became. He wanted to grab her there and then. If it had not been for the chaperone, he might have. She leaned back slowly, spreading her legs and stroking the insides of her thighs.

"You'd just love to feel these around you, wouldn't you?"

The chaperone looked at her sharply. "That'll be quite enough of that."

"Someone else just doing their job?"

Kline

Cynthia nervously lit a cigarette. She was scared. It was a kind of fear that she had never experienced before. She knew the breathless fear of life-threatening situations, but this was completely different. It was her first time on television. Her mind grabbed at the obvious details. Would someone out there in the huge TV audience recognize her from the old days? The plastic surgery she had undergone in Montreal before she had been planted in the deacons had not been particularly drastic. She knew it was a risk, but she had been given no instructions to cover such an event. Nobody had suspected that the deacons would decide to make her into a media star. She had sent out the emergency signals that she wanted to talk to her control, but no one had contacted her. She was on her own.

Beneath the details, there was the less complicated fear of the lights, the cameras, and the millions of pairs of invisible eyes watching her through their TV sets. She had been given a four-hour crash course in TV technique. It had not helped too much. She knew what she was supposed to do, but she still wondered if she could do it. Nothing that she had been taught in the PR section on the thirty-fifth floor stopped her legs from feeling like jelly or a sense of nausea from gathering in her stomach. Deacon Longstreet, a somewhat effeminate officer who handled his duties from a position of total cynicism, had tutored her on her public image and the official story that she was a simple country girl who had discovered, quite to her own surprise, that she could handle herself in a tight spot. Even he could not convince her that her mind would not become a complete blank when the camera was pointed at her.

This first ordeal was taking place live on the Vern and Emily show. They were broadcast locally on Channel 9 and distributed by satellite to the rest of the country. Vern and Emily Burnette ran a traditional Christian talk show. They were aggressively downhome, and Jesus played a continuous personal role in their public lives. Emily dispensed recipes, makeup tips, home hints, and advice on pet care. When she and Vern felt the need to leaven the relentlessly cute and folksy with some slightly harder content, they ran exposes of the evils of lust and promiscuity or the demon drink. Vern had a definite mean streak. He would dare prominent sinners to come on the show and, when they did, he would sweat mem without mercy. Vern and Emily were the third-rated show of their kind, following Harry Hollister's Happy Talk and The Ingram Family Hour in the national ratings.