“Why not?”
“The FBI didn’t give them to Chief Kramer, and—when this came up just now—he said if he called down there he was probably going to get the duty officer, who would stall him until the SAC came to work in the morning, so we decided to wait for you.”
“Jesus Christ!” Castillo exclaimed. “You said the undercover cop, Britton, is in Homicide. What’s that all about, Betty?”
“Why don’t we go back to ‘Sergeant Schneider’?” she said.
“You mean until this is over?”
“No, that’s not what I mean,” she said. “The reason Detective Britton is in Homicide is because we picked him— Ali Abd Ar-Raziq—up for questioning in a homicide.”
“You’re talking about the undercover cop?” Fernando asked.
"Yeah. The AALs like to know where every other AAL is all the time and what they’re doing. So when we really have to talk to them—more often when they really have to talk to us—we pick them up, with other unsavory characters.”
“Jesus Christ! I wouldn’t mind taking on the FBI duty of ficer as a Secret Service agent, but I can’t walk into an FBI office in my uniform! They’d lock me up until—”
He banged his fist on the dashboard.
“We need those damned names!” Castillo said, clearly frustrated.
No one said anything.
“And I don’t have any dates or anything,” he said after a moment. “Betty, when was this?”
“I’ll have to look it up, Mr. Castillo,” she said. “And I can’t do that until we get to Homicide or out to the arsenal.”
“ ‘Mr. Castillo’?” he parroted.
“Yeah. You’re ‘Mr. Castillo,’ and I’m ‘Sergeant Schneider. ’ Okay?”
“Whatever you say, Sergeant Schneider.”
“We’ll be at the Roundhouse in just a couple of minutes, Mr. Castillo,” she said. “We’ll deal with it then.”
[THREE]
Homicide Bureau Police Administration Building 8th and Race Streets Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 0225 10 June 2005
Chief Inspector Dutch Kramer was almost visibly of two minds when he saw Major C. G. Castillo in his Class A uniform.
“What’s with the uniform?” he asked.
“I never really got out of the stockade, Chief,” Castillo said. “They sort of paroled me to the Secret Service.”
“So why are you wearing it now?”
“I just came from the stockade,” Castillo said. “Most of the guys in there think the Secret Service is a bunch of candy asses.”
“And they’re right. They’re not as bad as the fing FBI, but they also think their sh—”
Kramer remembered gentlemen don’t say things like “their shit don’t stink” in the presence of ladies, and Betty Schneider was both one hell of a cop and a lady.
“Schneider tell you about what Britton came up with?” he asked, changing the subject.
“I think this is good stuff, Chief,” Castillo said. “We’ll have to check it out, but if these two at Britton’s mosque went to flight school in Oklahoma they probably went to Spartan, in Tulsa. And I know they teach the 727 at Spartan.”
“How do you know that?”