Chinatown isn’t on the list of Brad’s preferred neighborhoods to work in. Fortunately, few murders are committed in the warren of shops, tenements and family-run restaurants that make up this world-famous corner of Manhattan. These days, tourists are the main trade and money machine for the people who live and work here. There’s gang violence between Canal and Worth Street, sure. This is New York, after all. But most of the people who work in Chinatown, and the rest of the Lower East Side, no longer live there. Much of the organized crime has moved with them, away from the watchful eye of the NYPD to suburbs and other American cities not in the crosshairs of the world’s attention.

Today, however, all those changes mean nothing. Manhattan does her dirty best to make Brad as unhappy with his lot as possible. There’s a body in a tiny apartment above a Chinese restaurant, and in the fetid humidity of the late afternoon it doesn’t matter that the old man can’t have been dead more than a few hours. Brad has been in the airless front parlor since before lunchtime, and the CSI team are still busy. The one bit of progress they’ve made in the last couple of hours is that the dead man’s daughter has been traced; she has come from New Jersey to take her mother away from the scene. The elderly lady’s English is rudimentary, and even with the translator she wouldn’t budge from her dead husband’s side. Now she’s at NewYork-Presbyterian, admitted overnight for shock. Brad half wishes he could’ve left with the paramedics, too, just to get away from this dismal crime scene.

Not that it’s messy. The old man sat on the sofa watching TV when someone shot him through the chest. The neighbors heard the shot and called the police. Brad has his suspicion about the case. Nothing in the apartment seems disturbed. Old Mrs. Liu came home from her daily shopping trip to the squad car parked outside and the whole block in uproar. If someone asked Brad at this moment what he thought had happened here, he would hazard a guess at attempted robbery gone wrong. But nobody will ask him yet, not until he and Eric have done the entire preliminary investigation.

For now, finally, they and the CSI team can do no more. Brad shrugs back into his suit jacket with ill grace. He is sweating and feels lightheaded. The coroner loads the body onto a gurney, and the crime scene techs pack away their equipment. The uniformed policemen who responded to the 911 call have made a first sweep under Eric’s supervision, and interviewed every resident present in the building, as well as every employee of the restaurant downstairs, and the commercial printer working from his shop in the courtyard. Liu’s daughter has agreed to get her siblings to contact the station. None of them live in the tenement any longer.

Brad jerks his head at Eric, who is on the phone. “Let’s go,” he says in an undertone. “The uniforms can finish up, and we’re not getting anything here we don’t already got.”

As they exit the front of the building into a gaggle of onlookers, Eric ends his phone call. “That was the chief,” he says. “He’s asked me to do him a favor. You don’t have to come if you don’t want to.” He gives Brad an appraising glance. “You look like you need to lie down, or have a drink.”

“Just getting a headache,” Brad says. “What does the captain need from you?”

“He just had a call, from the wife of an old friend. Vivienne Aubert.”

“The actress?” Brad asks.

“That’s her,” Eric says. “She called him herself. Says she was followed and harassed by some men when she arrived at JFK today.”

Brad doesn’t point out the obvious—they’re not the kind of officers to respond to a call like that. Eric has a special relationship with their captain, who has become a mentor to this gifted young man and has pulled in a lot of favors to make Eric one of the youngest detectives the NYPD has had in the last ten years. “All right,” he says. “Let’s check on your celebrity friend.”

Eric gives him a sideways glance, looking a little sour. “The reason I agreed,” he says with as much dignity as he can muster, “is that Miss Aubert is currently at an address just around the corner from here.”

Brad grins, finding this little detour, and needling his partner, the perfect antidote to the day he’s just had. “Yeah, yeah,” he says. “I like to rub shoulders with famous people, too.”

Eric cuffs him on the arm, rolling his eyes. Brad makes a magnanimous sweeping gesture. “This is your case, Detective. Lead the way.”