I backed out and peered into the men’s room. The damage was just as appalling, except for the absence of makeup. No one looking for drugs would have looted the locker rooms, although I suppose a serious addict might have been hunting jewelry or electronics. Could one person have done this on his own in five hours? The dumping maybe, but hundreds of lockers had been opened. It looked like a team effort.

I snapped some pictures and moved on to the back staircase. As I started up, I understood what the guard had meant by following the noise. The manager’s office was a small space, and it was overflowing with screaming clients. A man in a purple Wildcats sweatshirt was pounding the desk demanding a refund, two women were shouting about something stolen, a third, weeping in fury, was waving a silver gym bag whose torn lining was hanging out.

“Two hundred twenty-five dollars! This is a Stella McCartney original. Are you going to reimburse me or not?”

“Take a number,” LaPorte snapped at me when I squeezed through to her desk. “I can only deal with one person at a time.”

“I’m V.I. Warshawski, the detective—we spoke earlier. Let me know when to come back.”

LaPorte pressed her palms against her eyes. “There won’t be a good time. There will never be a good time. This is going to go on all night.”

“Damn right,” the man said. “It’s going to go on until you tell us when you’re going to pay for the damages.”

I climbed onto the desk and the room quieted. I looked down at the crowd. “Did the police take down the crime-scene tape, or was that you heroes?”

There was some grumbling and then another outburst from the Stella McCartney woman, wanting to know what difference that made and insisting it didn’t get me off the hook from replacing her property.

I tried to school my face into a mix of sorrow and pity instead of annoyance and impatience. “If you removed the tape, there’s no way to prove that your property was damaged by the vandals who broke into the locker room. Six-Points values you as a member and doesn’t want a legal hassle, but their insurance carrier will be cranky because there’s no way to prove you aren’t bringing ruined property in from outside, hoping to cash in on the disaster. You can’t file a police report, which you need when you’re making a claim, because you tampered with a crime scene. Fresh prints on top of the fingerprint powder will be pretty easy to ID.”