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off, differences in class and income and education seemed less important and the playing field almost level. O’Hara isn’t so naive anymore. She realizes now that death is the only leveler, and although some of these kids will undoubtedly get laid post-vigil, it’s the prospect of death, not sex, that’s brought them into the park tonight.
    At the center of the circle are five stone mounds often commandeered by tattooed jugglers, fire eaters and street comedians. When the crowd settles, some twenty students separate themselves from the pack, divide into groups of three and four, and climb onto the elevated platforms. Then a female student, small and blond, wearing a camel-hair coat, steps out from the crowd to face them. When she throws her arms into the air, twenty voices rise into the snow-filled night, and as O’Hara follows them upward, she looks north over the scaled-down Arc de Triomphe and elegant town houses just north of the park to the office towers of Midtown, where these same kids will soon be fighting hand to hand, cubicle to cubicle. In the middle of the dirge, which O’Hara is pretty sure is in Latin, her cell goes off.
    â€œDarlene,” says George Loomis, another detective in the Seven, “some skell in East River Park just stumbled on a body by the tennis courts. Me and Navarro are on our way over, but thought you’d want to know. The description sounds a lot like your girl.”

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    Krekorian does a U-turn on LaGuardia, and with his siren pushing aside the sparse traffic, runs reds across town. Just short of the river, he takes the access road under the FDR Drive into the park and turns toward the pulsing lights in the shadow of the Williamsburg Bridge. East River Park is a narrow strip of public recreational space squeezed between the highway and the river that no one at tonight’s vigil is likely to have set foot in, not because it’s a wretched place, but because the highway cuts it off from the city. During the day, families from the projects take the walkways that cross over the highway into the park, but at night, it’s a no-man’s-land. If you’re looking for a spot to dump a body, you could do a lot worse.
    Krekorian drives south past the soccer fields and the baseball diamonds, and pulls in behind the squad car parked between the tennis courts and an overgrown bathroom. Whitewashed by a couple of inches of fresh snow, the park looks as good as it ever will, but the snow can’t do much for the FDR over their shoulder or the black undercarriage of the bridge or the warehouses that form the Williamsburg skyline across the river. On the other side of the squad car, blocked in by a van fromCrime Scene, is a piece-of-crap Impala as filthy as theirs, and standing beside it are Steve Navarro, George Loomis and Russ Dineen.
    Navarro and Loomis, who wear dark wool topcoats pulled off the same oversize discount rack, are fellow Seventh Precinct detectives who work the shift opposite O’Hara and Krekorian, and because this part of the park, the approximate latitude of Delancey Street, falls in the Seven, they got the call. The third, much smaller man, an unlit Camel bobbing precariously from the corner of his mouth, and wearing a leather jacket with a Grim Reaper patch sewn on the shoulder, is a medical legal inspector named Russ Dineen. Over the summer O’Hara and MLI Dineen worked on the suicide of a young female Indian intern. Before anyone bothered to pick up the phone, the body had been facedown in a tub for days, and thanks to Dineen, the straightforward but unforgettable phrase “Indian people soup” was added to O’Hara’s lexicon.
    Crime Scene has taped off a large rectangle around the bathroom, using the tennis court fence for one side. O’Hara wants nothing more than to duck under the yellow tape and see for herself if it’s Pena, but etiquette requires that she first exchange pleasantries with the men who