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number of people looking down from their windows, I imagined there’d be a lot of canvassing to do and cell-phone photo and video evidence to collect. Canvassing and collecting, because the preliminary info we’d already been given was that the first cops on the scene had quickly ascertained that the dead man had come through a closed window before plummeting down to the sidewalk.
    Suicide jumpers tended to open the window first.
    My other question—why we were being called out to a potential murder in Queens, when that’s pretty much the local homicide squad’s exact job description—was also easily answered. The victim was a diplomat.
    A Russian diplomat.
    As we approached, I looked up and saw a couple of guys leaning out a window on the top floor of the building, directly above the tent. They were probably the local investigators. It was a safe bet they wouldn’t be too pleased to see us. Also, it looked like our victim had missed the trees on his way down, which didn’t bode well for what shape his body would be in.
    Aparo and I stopped at the tent door. There was a handful of forensic technicians busily taking pictures and collecting samples and doing all the geeky things they do. I asked for the coroner. He was still there, waiting for the green light to whisk the body away to his windowless lair, and stepped out of the geek scrum. As we hadn’t met before, we introduced ourselves. His name was Lucas Harding and he had the same unnervingly casual demeanor all medical examiners seemed to have.
    Harding invited us into his fiefdom. We slipped some paper booties over our shoes, donned the requisite rubber gloves, and followed him in.
    It was not a pretty sight.
    No body that flew down six stories onto a concrete sidewalk ever was.
    I’d only ever seen one similar corpse in my day from a big fall like that, and although I’ve witnessed my fair share of blood and gore, it was a sight I’d never forgotten. The sheer fragility of our bodies is something most of us tend to ignore, but nothing brought that fragility rocketing into focus with such brutal clarity like seeing someone sprawled on the sidewalk like that.
    Despite a skull that was so pulverized it looked like it had been made out of plasticine before some giant baby had squashed it out of shape, it was still clear that we were looking at a white male adult with dark, short hair, somewhere in his thirties and in good shape, at least before the fall. He was dressed in a dark blue suit that was perforated in a couple of places—below his left elbow, and by his right shoulder—by shattered bones that had ripped through the cloth. There was a big puddle of coagulated blood around his head, and another to the left of his body, where it followed the slight angle in the sidewalk before pooling in a big crack in the concrete. Most gruesome, however, was his jaw. It seemed to have taken a direct hit and had been wrenched out of place, and was hanging off to one side like an oversized helmet chin strap that had been flicked off.
    There were also shards of broken glass around the body that we avoided stepping on.
    Harding noticed me glancing at them.
    “Yeah, the glass matches what the body’s telling us,” the coroner offered. “The arms are consistent with him extending them to try and break his fall. Pointless, of course, but instinctive. And it confirms he was alive and conscious when he fell. The position where he landed in relation to the edge of the building also fits the story. Suicide jumpers tend to just drop down. No one does it enthusiastically; it’s not like they’re leaping off a diving board. They usually just step off a ledge, and if that were the case, I’d have expected him to land a few feet closer to the base of the building than he did. This guy left the building with some momentum. If this sidewalk hadn’t been as wide as it is, he’d have landed on someone’s car.”
    “Do we have a positive ID?” I asked.
    Harding nodded. “First