She’s just like the photograph. Amid the already bright lights of Times Square, work lights make the scene feel like day. I can see my own reflection in her blood.

It was hard to tell from the two-dimensional photograph, but I can clearly make out where part of her face has been caved in from the impact. The asphalt is also dented. It appears as if she hit the ground hard.

All the evidence makes it seem like she really did fall from a tremendous height. But how is that possible?

A tech with a portable ultrasound unit is checking her bones as a fingerprint tech clears an area on her outstretched hand. The ultrasound screen shows hundreds of fractures. Her left shoulder is pulverized.

After taking it in for several minutes, Knoll turns to me. “What do you think, Blackwood?”

I’m not sure what I think. I can only say the obvious. “It looks like she fell. But I guess the question is where and when?”

He kneels down to examine the body more closely. “You don’t think here? It’s been planted?”

“I don’t know. There’s just not enough information. We know what he wants us to think. What happened is a different matter.”

A local agent introduces the deputy police commissioner to Knoll. Dressed in khakis and a T-shirt under his coat, Floyd Greene looks like he was just pulled out of bed. In his fifties, with gray hair and sharp features, he resembles an Irish cop out of an old movie. He gives me a polite nod before talking to Knoll. “Any observations, Special Agent Knoll?”

Knoll cranes his head and looks at a helicopter overhead. “No copter was overhead at the time?”

Greene leans in to say something privately to Knoll. He looks at my FBI ID around my neck again, then includes me. His voice is low, almost a whisper. “We’ve had five surface-to-air missile batteries around this island since 9/11. We’ve got radar that’ll tell us if a mosquito takes a piss in Central Park. Nothing gets past it. We didn’t see a thing.” He nods to the body. “Either our little angel here fell from heaven or someone planted her body here. There’s no way she got here any other way. Radar would tell us.”

Knoll scratches his head. “Balloon?”

“Anything big enough to carry a person is going to show up on radar.”

“What about a train of them?” The words sound stupid as I say them.

Greene gives me an intense gaze. “Explain?”

I only think of the idea because he said a balloon would be too big. “Instead of one large one, a few dozen smaller ones all tied to a long rope. Each one no more than a couple feet across.”

Greene turns to Knoll. “Who is she?”

“Agent Blackwood is the one we bring in to figure this kind of stuff out. Kind of an outside-the-box thinker. Real outside-the-box.” He says the last part matter-of-fact. Nowhere near the skepticism when we first met.