She shook her head. “No. I was with Royal at his house until about fifteen-twenty minutes ago.”

“When was the last time you were here?”

“Last night. After I got off work, I came here to change for dinner with Royal. He arrived to pick me up at six thirty. We drove to his house, dropped my stuff off and then went to dinner. I’m sure you heard the details of that. And then at eleven thirty, we went back Royal’s place.”

Shane wrote a few notes and then spoke, “Your apartment’s been broken into and ransacked. Your front door is broken so we know it happened after one when your neighbor came home. He said everything was fine when he got home from his date. But that date left at ten to ten this morning and noticed your door had been broken and only leaned against the jam. She told your neighbor who then called us.”

Royal snarled. “Oh great. Sometime between two and ten? Ask Benji or Garrett. Both of those losers came at Caroline last night. I may have punched Benji. In self-defense though. I caught the fist he’d aimed at her head as she’d sat there, unaware he was going to sucker punch her in the temple.”

“I’ve spoken with several people who saw what went down as well as to the officer on the scene and Elliot Charles over in Millersburg. They back up your account. But it wasn’t Benji. He went home and promptly got into a knock-down drag-out with his brother, who he’d found in bed with his girlfriend. He ended up in jail. Where he is even now.” Shane shrugged.

Impatient, Caroline interrupted. “Can I go in and see what’s going on? I mean is this a buy some new sheets and repaint over graffiti thing or oh boy call the dead-body-clean-up specialists sort of situation?”

Shane smiled at her joke and then got serious again. “More than the first and less than the last. Just brace yourself.”

“What about Garrett?” Royal was satisfied, for the moment, with Benji’s alibi, but there was another person who’d be capable of this.

“One of my guys is waiting at the golf course. I gave instructions not to go get him off the green. He’ll only make a big deal of it. We’ll intercept him as he leaves.”

Royal had been about to be angry over that, but Caroline sighed, clearly relieved. “Thank you. He’s going to make a big deal no matter what, but I can’t even imagine what he’d do if you came up to him during his golf game. That audience is already predisposed to him anyway.”

“He’s a pain in my ass.” Shane rubbed the back of his neck. “Come on and check it out. There’s not a lot to find. My crime-scene people left about three minutes before you two came around the corner.”

Royal took her hand as they followed Shane up the stairs.

She gasped when she saw her door. It looked like someone had messed with the jamb and wall where the locks were and punched around it. It wasn’t on both hinges though, so it leaned drunkenly against the wall.

“Your landlord is out dealing with getting a new door, so someone should be by soon enough to get the old one out and the new one installed,” Shane explained.

Inside, the sheer level of destruction was bad enough that even Royal gasped.

All the pictures she’d had on walls and shelves had been pulled down and stomped or crushed with something. Broken glass from the frames was everywhere.

Caroline had her hand pressed up to her belly. Royal took the other one.

“This is personal.” She let go of her stomach to wave a hand around the room. “They could have stolen a lot of stuff they broke instead.”

Shane nodded. “I won’t know for sure until I work through all the facts, but I’m leaning toward that, myself.”

She carefully stepped around the remains of the recycled soda bottle glasses she drank her orange juice from every day. “I bought those glasses back in law school. It was a running joke that I have to buy new dishes once a year because I break them so often, but we’ve never actually broken one of those glasses.”

Royal squeezed her hand.

Her bedroom though. Caroline paused, not totally able to stop the sound at the sight of what they’d done.

Her dresser had been emptied. Her panties and bras and shirts and pajamas and those few pieces of sexy lingerie she had lay strewn over every surface. Some of them had been cut to ribbons.

Her pillows had been shredded, though her bedding had fared slightly better. But the antique perfume bottles she’d started collecting about seven years before had all been broken and stomped.

The glitter of blue shards of glass made her heart break. Her favorite. “Oh.” She swallowed back her tears. “That was art nouveau. I bought it when I was able to pay myself the first time after setting up my firm back in Seattle. Such a silly splurge. But it was so pretty.”

Royal heard the tears in her voice, even as she cleared her throat he could see how upset she was. Every few minutes a fine tremor worked through her, and her eyes were wider than they should have been.

He knew she was trying to hold it together so he’d give her something to do. “Did you at least have renter’s insurance?”

Caroline nodded, her vision clearing a little. “I do. But some things can’t be replaced. There just are fewer of those things left. That’s a real shame. Who does that?” Her last words were close to a sob.

Shane stood in front of her, taking her attention from all the devastation. “Caroline. Hey. I’m sorry. This is terrible and I’m sorry it happened to you. But I need you to keep focus so I can figure out if anything is missing. Sometimes this sort of destruction can hide the theft of something small for weeks or months until everything gets cleaned up and it all starts getting replaced. People just don’t notice everything. I need your help.”