in bed with her, sitting cross-legged across from her.
'While you're cutting me a piece of that,' he said, 'and while I'm chewing it, tell me how in the hell you got involved with these people.'
Susan exhaled audibly, looked at Matt, then dropped her eyes to the slab of pink roast beef on the plate between her legs and started cutting it.
'Jennie-' she began.
'Jennifer Downs Ollwood,' Matt interrupted. 'Five feet four inches, 130 pounds, brown eyes, black hair worn in bangs, got herself kicked out of Bennington for taking free speech a step too far by assaulting a campus police officer, then transferred to the University of Pittsburgh. What about her?'
'You seem to know everything about her.'
'Come on, honey. I'm just trying to save time. We still have to take you home to Mommy and Daddy sometime tonight.'
'Until you said that,' Susan said, 'I completely forgot about having to go home. What time is it?'
He looked at his watch.
'Half past ten.'
'It seems like much later,' she said.
'Well, didn't you notice? A lot's happened tonight.'
'We're going to have to go soon.'
'Not until we're finished,' he said, and then smiled. 'I already have a reputation for keeping the Reynolds family virgin out all night. Mommy would probably be surprised, even disappointed, if I brought you home early.'
'I guess that means I don't get arrested tonight, if you're going to take me home,' Susan said, making what she instantly realized was a bad little joke.
'Not by me. Not ever by me,' Matt said seriously. 'But I can't speak for the rest of the law-enforcement community.'
'Matt, I'm scared.'
'Well, you should be. What about the Ollwood woman? Did she meet Chenowith at the University of Pittsburgh? Or were they already planning armed revolution and rebellion at Bennington?'
'I don't know where she met him,' Susan said. 'But you have to understand about Jennie, Matt.'
'What do I have to understand?'
'She is no more capable of blowing up a building than I am.'
'The fact is that she did. There's no question about that, honey.'
'You have to understand her.'
'Understand what, Susan?'
'Her family is a disaster,' Susan said. 'Her mother's a drunk, on her fourth husband. Her father doesn't give a damn about her. She's all alone, Matt, and always has been. Until, of course, Bryan came along. Whatever she did was because of Bryan.'
'That's bullshit, honey,' Matt said gently. 'She might have been strongly attracted to this character, that's understandable. But once she found out that he was seriously considering doing something like blowing up a building-there's a hell of a difference between hitting a campus cop with your 'Fair Play For Animals!' sign and robbing a National Guard armory to get explosives and weapons-'
'You know about that?' Susan interrupted.
'We even know the serial numbers of the carbines they stole. And that your friend Chenowith-'
'He's not my friend, Matt!'
'— has chopped down one of them into a movie-style terrorist's machine pistol to use when he robs banks.'
'Well, that answered another question I had. You know about the banks.'
'Yeah, we know about the banks. And it's only a question of time before Robin Hood decides he has to use that machine pistol, and other innocent people get killed.'
She met his eyes and then looked away.
'You want to hear about Jennie?' she asked softly.
'Yeah,' Matt said. 'I do. I left off saying that she had a choice to make when she understood that he was about to do some very terrible things, and she made the wrong one. I can't work up much sympathy for your friend, honey, drunken mother on her fourth husband or not.'
'You said, in the car, that you were… 'sucked into' your relationship with Penny Detweiler. That she was really fucked up, and really needed you.'
'I wondered why you picked up on that,' Matt said. 'That's how it is with you and the Ollwood woman?'
Susan nodded.
'After-what happened at the Univer-'
'Let's knock off the euphemisms,' Matt said. 'What happened was that your friend actively assisted Chenowith in the placement and detonation of an explosive device in a building on a college campus, and caused the deaths of eleven innocent people.'
'All right,' Susan said, her voice choked. Tears formed in her eyes and ran down her cheeks.
'Say it, honey,' Matt said gently but insistently.
She sighed.
'After Bryan… blew up the building, and the police started looking for him, Jennie called me. She was hysterical. Desperate. I felt so sorry for her. And she said she absolutely had to have some money…'
'And you gave it to her,' Matt finished. 'And as you were aware she was involved in blowing up the science building, that made you an accessory after the fact.'
'I didn't think about that,' Susan said, and looked at him through tear-filled eyes. 'My friend was all fucked up, Matt. She had nobody else to turn to. I had to help.'
'Where did you get the money?' he asked, ignoring her.
'It was mine,' she said.
'Where did you get it? Specifically, did you take it out of the bank? Is there a record of you making a substantial '-Of course there isn't. If there was, the FBI would have known about it, and told me-'withdrawal-'
'No,' Susan said. 'I had it. I had a quarterly dividend check from Chrysler that day, and I had just cashed it-I was going shopping-and I gave her the money.'
'No, you didn't,' Matt said.
'What?'
'You will swear on a stack of Bibles that you didn't give her any money. I don't think the FBI knows about that, and we don't want them to know. You cashed the check to go shopping, didn't buy anything, and just kept the money around and pissed it away on routine expenses. How much was it?'
'Three thousand and change,' Susan said, very softly. 'Matt, I'm not a very good liar.'
'Well, you fooled me, honey. You told me you were just not interested, and I believed you.'
'Oh, Matt!'
'I'm serious. You're a good liar, which is a good thing.'
'Matt, there is something about money…'
'What?'
'I'm holding some money for Bryan.'
'From the bank jobs?'
She nodded.
'Jesus Christ, why?'
'Because he asked me to. Or he got Jennie to ask me to. Same thing.'
'Did he tell you why?'
'Against the possibility of his being arrested-'
'The inevitability,' Matt interrupted.
'— to hire a good lawyer.'
'Shit,' Matt said. 'He's stupid. For one thing-let me explain how this will work-for one thing, the FBI knows all about the bank robberies. He did another one a couple of days ago, in Clinton, New Jersey. Dressed up like a
