Bending down, he picked up some shards that had broken loose from a Venetian mirror. The thing had been struck with something that vaguely resembled a human back, the center of the piece smashed in a long, torso-like column.

The fine spray of white powder all over it seemed to suggest that the police had gotten busy dusting for fingerprints.

Man, someone sure as hell had been thrown around the room.

Vin went over to the bar and put the jagged pieces of mirror next to some of the busted bottles. Then he resumed the search for exactly what the cops had no doubt been after.

No blood that he could see. But maybe they had already removed the things that had been marked by it.

Besides, bruises bled under the skin, so it wasn’t as if a lack of the stuff here was necessarily going to help him.

While the CPD had been in the building, undoubtedly they’d questioned the lobby guard—except it wasn’t like the guy could testify to Vin’s not being in the apartment. After all, residents could take the elevators up from the parking…garage.

Vin went over to the phone and called down to the front desk. When a male voice answered, he didn’t fuck around. “Gary, it’s Vin—did you give the police access to the security tapes of the elevators and the stairwells in the building?”

There was absolutely no pause whatsoever. “Jesus, Mr. diPietro, why’d you do it—”

“I didn’t. I swear. Did the CPD get those tapes?”

“Yeah, they got everything.”

Vin exhaled in relief. There was no way he could have gotten to the duplex without showing up in one of those recordings. In fact, what they were going to prove was that he’d left the building that morning and not returned until after midnight.

“And you were on camera,” the guard said.

Vin blinked. “What?”

“You came up in the garage elevator at ten o’clock. It’s on the tape.”

“What?” That would have been impossible—at the time he’d been in the car, driving to the Woods with Marie-Terese. “Wait, you saw my face. You actually saw my face.”

“Yeah, clear as day. She came through the front doors and went up to the duplex, and then twenty minutes later you came in through the garage. You had on your black trench coat and you left like a half hour later, with your Boston Sox cap pulled low.”

“It wasn’t me. It—”

“It was.”

“But…I didn’t park my BMW in my spot—it was gone, and my other car was there. I didn’t use my pass card to get through the gate. Explain—”

“You got a ride, then, and came in through the pedestrian door. I don’t know. Look, I got to go. We’re running a test of the fire alarm.”

The line went dead.