When I got to Six-Points Gym: Fitness for Life, it was just after five. The building was a kind of outsize warehouse. A signboard at the entrance advertised an Olympic-size pool, a dozen basketball courts, yoga rooms, weight rooms, five restaurants, and a separate spa wing. The sign urged me to join and become fit for life. Special rates for college and high-school students, 30 percent off for everyone who joined today. There must have been a lot of cancellations after the break-in.

The sign also explained the Six Points: use your head and heart to power your four limbs to fitness.

A security camera videoed the main entrance, but the eye had been covered with a piece of chewing gum. Inside, a guard the size of a football tackle was dealing with a woman who demanded he let her into the locker room right now! He looked at me humorlessly and asked for my membership card and a photo ID.

“You were here during the break-in?” I said while the woman shouted that she’d been here before me and I couldn’t butt in like I owned the place.

“And you get to ask questions because . . . ?” the guard said.

“Because I’m a detective who’s been hired to help with the investigation. Denise LaPorte is expecting me.”

The guard looked as though he’d like to pick me up and break me in half, just for someone to vent his frustration on, but he picked up the desk phone instead and called for permission to let me in.

“Down the hall to the back staircase and up to the second floor. You’ll find her—just follow the noise.”

“And were you here during the break-in?”

“What kind of asshole question is that? Of course not. We’re closed from midnight to five a.m.—that’s when it happened.”

By the time I left, the angry woman had been joined by a couple of men also demanding answers.

I passed locker rooms. Police tape had been crisscrossed over the entrances, but someone had torn it down.

You know the footage that TV loves to show after a tornado or an earthquake, with homes and furniture flung across the landscape? That’s what I saw when I stepped over the tape: every locker in the women’s room had been pried open. Gym bags and backpacks had been dumped. Bras, tampons, water bottles, swimsuits, candy wrappers, makeup kits—all scattered over the benches and floor. Fingerprint dust had settled on the clothes, making them look like the tired remains of a dust storm.