The death of an elderly man trying to find who was responsible for the torture killing of his son in 1973 Chile leads to a high-level foreign colonel who is now in a Manhattan hospital.

When a gay man is beaten to death during the abduction of his adopted infant son, Detectives Briscoe and Green suspect that ransom from the murder victim's wealthy partner may have been the motive for the crime. But as more is learned about the child's birth mother and homophobic biological father, Assistant D.A.'s McCoy and Carmichael find that what appeared to be a botched kidnapping might be more accurately prosecuted as a hate crime.

A struggling actress is murdered in an apparent robbery-homicide where a video tape, made by a couple touring the city sold to a local news station, shows three suspects loading the stolen property into an SUV. They are charged with felony murder, a capital crime, and causes unrest with Southerlyn surrounding the death penalty.

The detectives are skeptical when a former street activist turned shock jock with a history of staging phony muggings to gain publicity for his causes appears to be the subject of an attempt on his life after publicly assailing a mobster, but they begin to believe his story after they discover that the married jock was involved with the mobster's mistress.