“Well,” the doctor replied, “as we’ve just seen on the videotape, she obviously survived, at least for a few moments, but it is unlikely in the extreme that she could recover from the sort of injuries she must have sustained in the fall. I’d say it was virtually impossible that she lived more than a minute or two after striking the earth.”

“That still don’t make it a homicide,” Dino said.

“It’s a homicide,” Stone said. “If she’s dead.”

“Whaddaya mean ’if she’s dead’?” Dino asked. “Didn’t you hear the doctor, there? She’s a fuckin’ pancake.”

“Look,” Stone said, “do you know what terminal velocity is?”

“Nope,” Dino replied. Nobody else did either.

“An object in a vacuum, when dropped from a height, will accelerate at the rate of thirty-two feet per second, and continue accelerating—in a vacuum. But in an atmosphere, like the earth’s, there will come a point when air resistance becomes equal to acceleration, and, at that point, the object will fall at a steady rate.”

“But it’ll keep falling,” Dino said, puzzled.

“Sure, but it’ll stop accelerating.” Stone had everyone’s undivided attention now. “I read a piece in the Times a few weeks ago about cats, and how cats have been known to fall from a great height and survive. There was one documented case where a cat fell twenty-six stories, landed on concrete, and survived with only a couple of broken bones.”

“How the fuck could it survive a fall like that?” a detective asked.

“Like this,” Stone said. He held out his hand, palm down. “When a cat starts to fall, he immediately orients himself feet first—you know that cats will always land on their feet, right?”

“Right,” the detective said.

“Not only does he get into a feet-first position, but he spread-eagles into what’s called the flying-squirrel position, like this.” He spread his fingers. “Flying squirrels don’t fly, like birds, they glide, because they have a membrane connecting their front and back legs, and, when they spread out, they’re sort of like a furry Frisbee.”

“But a cat ain’t a flying squirrel,” another detective said.

“No,” Stone agreed, “and he can’t glide like one. But by presenting the greatest possible area to the air resistance, a cat slows down his rate of acceleration and, consequently, his terminal velocity.”

“You mean he falls slow,” Dino said.

“Compared to a human being, anyway. A cat’s terminal velocity is about sixty miles an hour. But a human being’s terminal velocity is a hundred and twenty miles an hour. That’s why a cat could survive a fall from twenty-six stories, when no human could.”

The group digested this for a moment.

“But Sasha Nijinsky ain’t no cat,” Dino said.