I peered over the top of the wall at the surface of the bridge. Just below me, stored on the other side, were four large wooden barrels.

“Take a look for yourselves,” I said, as I jumped down.

Mercer lifted one of his long legs onto the railing iron and looked over the wall. “Easy enough, Alex. You’re right. Up over the top. Climb down onto the barrels. And assuming there are more like those on the other end, you’d be home free.”

“Interesting idea,” Mike said, positioning himself beside Mercer to look for himself.

“Are we going to stand out here in the cold and debate this, or do something about it?” I asked.

“Your lips are turning blue, kid. Why don’t you wait in Leighton’s Jag? Get comfy,” Mike said to me, then turned back to Mercer. “Let me call the lieutenant and see if he can get Bronx Homicide to do a plate check on the cars parked around on the other side. See if anybody was ticketed during the night. Someone could have led Anita out on the bridge to her death, and there’d be no trace that he’d even been in Manhattan.”

“That’s true,” Mercer said. “If your perp was smart enough to have planned all this-worried about getting caught-then he’d know that even a check of EZ pass plates would show he left Manhattan by bridge or tunnel the night before, and never came back.”

“See what I mean? And all the time, he’s just a hop, skip, and walk across the bridge away from the action in the Jumel Mansion.”

The two uniformed cops were approaching us. They must have taken all the information and sent the dog walkers on their way.

“We’re just going back to the street to get some tape to block off the scene,” one cop said to Mike. “You guys need anything?”

“Take Ms. Cooper with you, okay? My little hothouse flower looks like she’s about to freeze her ass off.”

“I’m not going to the car, Mike. I’m with you two until you figure out what’s next.”

“The park rangers opened up the tower for us this morning,” the cop said.

“They around to give us a hand?” Mercer asked.

“Are you kidding? Rangers on a frigid Sunday morning in January? We had to call to get them over here. They said they’d check back in before too long. Want me to tell them to be available if you need them?”

“Please.”

“It’s warm in there. Go on in and make your calls.”

The graceful granite water tower, almost two hundred feet high, was just a few yards away from the end of the bridge, much closer than the street where Mike and Mercer had left their cars. It was octagonal in shape, like the unusual room in the Jumel Mansion. It looked like a Renaissance church tower that had been lifted from the Tuscan countryside and planted on a Manhattan hilltop.

“Good idea,” Mike said to the more talkative cop. “You got enough tape with you so we can rope off the gate at the entrance to the bridge?”

“No problem. I’ll be back with it in a few minutes.”

The two cops led us toward the tower. Mercer walked on ahead. “Yeah, it’s open. Thanks.”

Mike was explaining that when water was originally pumped across the Harlem River over the High Bridge, it coursed through two iron pipes that still ran up the interior of the handsome structure, to equalize the pressure in the nearby holding reservoir.

“And now?” I asked.

“Just decorative. The tower’s got views from the top that you wouldn’t believe. You can practically see Paris.”

We went inside and even though the building wasn’t heated, it was a welcome shelter from the morning’s fierce winds.

“Hey, Loo?” Mike said, talking into his phone. “Time to rise and shine, Boss. Let me explain what’s happened since last night.”

Mercer and I listened while Mike tried to tell Peterson what had developed, and enlist his help in getting detectives from Bronx County on board to help.

“Yeah, and the congressman went AWOL. Don’t know. Maybe he’s getting the picture that the kid isn’t his. Maybe he had something to do with the scene on the bridge. He’s off the charts.”

“I’ve never been in here,” Mercer said. “But at least somebody spent a few nickels restoring this beauty, which I’m glad to see.”

“I didn’t even know about it.”

The redbrick walls in this small lobby were punctuated by twenty-foot-high windows on each of the eight sides. Running up from the basement below were the two iron pipes that had once carried all of Manhattan’s drinking water from upstate-painted a shiny black-and surrounding them was a wrought-iron staircase that twisted in a narrow spiral to the top of the tower.

Mike was still arguing with Peterson. “I appreciate how hard it is to get anyone to help at this hour of the morning, Loo, but we can’t cover the territory ourselves. There’s a lot going on, okay?”

“Want to check it out with me?” Mercer asked, as he craned his neck to point above us.

My shoulders shook with chills. “You know how much I hate heights. I trust you’ll tell me about it.”

“Even if it is Kendall Reid, he didn’t run this operation himself, Boss. Mercer and I need reinforcements, that’s what you’ve got to tell Commissioner Scully,” Mike said. “No, no. Battaglia doesn’t know she’s here with us. We’ll dump her at home on the way downtown.”

Mike flipped his phone shut

“Dump me?”

“Your teeth are chattering so loud, Coop, I can’t hear myself think.”

“I’m warming up in here,” I said. “This helps a lot.”

“What did Peterson say?” Mercer asked.

“He gave me a firm no to letting us go to Mayor Statler’s home to knock on the door and question him again. We can’t touch Kendall Reid until we bring Battaglia and Spindlis in on what we’ve got.” Mike paused to smile. “Peterson doesn’t miss a trick. Asked me whether I’d heard the rumors about Spindlis. Says if this whole thing has to do with hookers and escorts, maybe there’s fire behind that smoke. Maybe that’s why the DA jumped so fast on the Reid indictment, to clamp everybody down so Spindlis’s name didn’t come up.”

“Leave me out of that brainstorm,” I said. “Tell the lieutenant he can raise that errant thought with Battaglia because I sure as hell won’t.”

“Peterson also doesn’t want us to do anything about Donny Baynes unless the feds are part of it. He doesn’t have the manpower to have guys tracking down Ethan Leighton as well as sitting on Moses twenty-four/seven. Everything’s a friggin’ manpower issue in the department.”

“I’ll take the weight for bringing Alex out in the middle of the night,” Mercer said. “That was my idea.”

“Nice. You’re both making it sound like I’m a liability to you guys. Thanks a million. I’m looking forward to being dumped. I’m sure I can get somebody to drive me home.”

“The lieutenant’s bent out of shape ’cause your car got tagged Friday night,” Mike said. “He’s just soft for you.”

“I’m delighted to know I still have one fan.”

“Does he have anybody for us?” Mercer asked.

“The day tour starts in an hour. He says he’ll round up whoever comes in and send three or four guys over here to give us a hand.”

“Excellent.”

“Yeah. Might as well get going on the bridge. And I’d like to get the guys into the mansion to see what’s been going on there.”

The uniformed cop who had gone to the car to get yellow crime-scene tape returned. “Why don’t you start with this roll?” he asked. “If you need more, I’ll call the house and they’ll bring it over.”

“Thanks,” Mike said. “You going down by the riverbed where the body was found?”

“Yeah.”

“Mercer and I will work up on top, at the entrance to the bridge. We’ll tape it off first. And then, we’ll go over the wall and try to position ourselves directly above your spot, where you found the body. See if we can figure out where she dropped from. You mind spotting that with us?”

“Glad to do it,” the cop said.

“Okay if I wait here?” I asked.

“I told you it was comfortable, right?” the cop said.