ADA Sing left Alex’s office in a huff and barely nodded to Jack as he passed, buttoning up his black trench coat on the way out.

Jack took the desserts off the receptionist’s desk and went into Alex’s office. He could tell she was stressed even as she welcomed him with a small smile, knowing what was in the Tofu King bag.

“What’s up, lady?” Jack said as he placed the treats on her desk.

“Same old crap,” Alex answered sweetly. “You know, police misconduct, false allegations, trumped-up charges. The usual NYPD game.”

Jack took a breath and teased, “There’s always three sides to every story.”

“Don’t even try Rashomon on me,” Alex warned. “We have a videotape of what really happened at City Hall, made by a friend of the ‘perpetrator.’ And it’s going to exonerate my client, who, by the way, is a war veteran. A hero, mind you.”

Jack shook his head, though he agreed with her.

“This one’s going to be a slam dunk,” Alex said matter-of-factly.

Jack took her hand in his, felt the warm softness there. “Cold,” she said. “You came a long way. How’s your morning going?”

“Better, now that I’m here.” She rubbed his hand in hers, but they separated awkwardly as the receptionist entered the storefront.

“Thanks for the sweet stuff,” Alex said quietly.

“Sure,” Jack answered as the receptionist booted up her desktop computer. “Call you later.” He exited her office and left the storefront without conversing with the receptionist. Catch an M15 north, he was thinking, heading for the Ninth Precinct.

Floating

THEY CAME TO the railing that separates parkland from the seawall embankment, looking out over the Harlem River.

“Jeez, it’s fuckin’ freezing,” cursed Patrolman Mulligan.

It was an hour before the end of the shift in Manhattan North, and it wasn’t the first time that the Thirty-Second Precinct, the Three-Two, had to fish a floater out of the Harlem River.

“Let’s get in the rowboat,” the taller man, Sergeant Cohen, said. “It’s only about fifty yards out.”

At its narrowest point, the Harlem River was still almost a quarter-mile wide, about four city blocks across, and as the two cops squinted against the river wind, they could see a bulky shape entangled in tree branches near the middle of the river. The limbs were snagged up against some chunky ice floes.

“Time for a close-up,” the sergeant said.

Sergeant Cohen was in his forties, and his gray, ball-bearing pupils focused on the aluminum Columbia University rowboat at the water’s edge. The land part was operated by the Parks Department.

“Let’s go, kid,” the sergeant said to the patrolman. “The river’s half frozen anyway.”

PO Mulligan, twenty years younger, held the rowboat steady as Sergeant Cohen stepped in and squatted. Mulligan shoved off, jumping in as the rowboat skimmed in the direction of the submerged tree stump.

Mulligan pulled up his blue NYPD-monogrammed turtleneck. “Freezing,” he repeated, breathing evenly as he set the oars.

They could hear the distant crackle of radio broadcasts as he started rowing through the surface ice. The patrolman pulled on the oars, figuring the distance at a couple dozen strokes.

The radio sounds got louder, until out of the gray wash came the Harbor Unit, a twin-engine Detroit fast-boat, approaching from the Bronx side of the Third Avenue Bridge. Sergeant Cohen could make out two additional uniformed officers on board and figured it quickly: simultaneous calls and dispatch. Multiple calls must have come through 911 emergency, from both the South Bronx and Manhattan North precincts. Reports of a body snagged on a tree in the river.

The Harbor Unit had been docked on the South Bronx waterfront near Hunts Point and had taken aboard the cops from the Forty-Fourth Precinct when the dispatch went out. From the fast-boat they could see the two cops in the rowboat, out from the Manhattan side, rowing closer to the bulky shape now, which was looking more like a body as they approached. The NYPD boat cut its engines, maneuvering now as its arrival sent ripples though the chunks of ice.

Sergeant Cohen could see clearly as they came within ten feet: it was a body, with black hair, head and torso just under the surface of the water, its right arm raised, caught in the branches of the tree. Like he was a student, raising his arm in a classroom. The drag of the stump, and the ice floes that had drifted around it, had kept everything in place.

The Harbor Unit boat came about and bumped up against the ice, nudging the scene more toward the Manhattan side.

Overtime, thought Sergeant Cohen. Finally he was close enough to lift the head out of the water with his baton. Male, Asian, he thought. Twenty-something, maybe thirty years old. PO Mulligan worked the oars against the ice. A jumper? Or something else? There was no blood that he could see. “How’d he wind up in the river?” Cohen wondered aloud.

“Hey!” one of the blues on the Harbor boat deck yelled. “Whaddya think? Someone from your side? You had jumpers before …” He looked vaguely Hispanic and also wore the stripes of a sergeant.

Sergeant Cohen barked back, “Who knows? Could have been your side, too. Like the Bruckner, or Hunts Point. Plenty of vics from over there.”

The Harbor Unit skipper, a Nordic face, took a call over the boat radio.

There was a pause between the different cops, when all they could hear was the lapping of the currents against the ice and the whistle of the wind across the mouth of the bay. The Macombs Dam Bridge towered in the distance.

The second cop on the harbor boat, a white patrolman from the Four-Four Bronx Precinct, said, “Looks like a dead Chink to me.” His Latino sergeant agreed: “El chino.”

PO Mulligan countered, “Could be a Jap. Or Korean.” His Manhattan sense of diversity.

“They’re all the same,” the boat-deck patrolman said, shrugging.

“Asian,” Sergeant Cohen settled on.

“Whatever,” the Latino sarge said. “You want the case or not? All our dicks are working the club fire, anyway.”

All the cops had heard about it, an enraged partygoer had returned to the Happy World Social Club with a gun and a can of gasoline, and now thirteen Central American immigrants lay dead in the smoldering ruins.

“And besides,” the sarge continued from the deck, “the scene’s closer to your side of the river now.”

“Yeah, Manhattan.” The Bronx patrolman grinned. “There’s more Chinks in Manhattan anyways.”

“Come back, Harbor Two,” the boat radio crackled again.

“Negative, we don’t need scuba, copy?” the blond skipper answered. More static from the radio. “We’ve got an Asian in the water,” the skipper continued.

“Agent?” came from the radio. “What agent?”

“No, an Asian,” repeated the skipper.

“What agency? What agent, Harbor Two?”

“Negative.” The skipper paused on the open line, annoyed, when the Bronx patrolman yelled into the radio, “We got a dead Chink in the drink! Copy?”

“Oh,” responded dispatch drily. “Okay. Copy that. Ten-four.”

The patrolman smirked as his sergeant said toward Sergeant Cohen, “It’s all yours, Manhattan.”

“Wait for EMS, okay?” said dispatch.

“Copy that,” answered Sergeant Cohen. “Call the house,” he said to Mulligan. “Tell them we could use a Chinese, uh, Asian detective.”

North

THE BEATEN-DOWN LANDSCAPE of the Lower East Side flashed past the bus window as Jack’s cell phone sounded. It was a number he didn’t recognize, but he flipped open the phone and took the call.

“Detective Yu?” asked a female dispatcher.

“Correct,” Jack answered, keeping his voice even in the noise of the city bus.

“Report to Manhattan North,” she said under some static.