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Division,” he said, handing me his card. “I didn’t want to wake your father. I’m sure he needs his rest. The doctor said he’s in stable condition.”
    “But he hasn’t regained consciousness,” I said. “I don’t think that can be good.”
    “So he hasn’t been able to tell you what happened?”
    “No, but I think that should be obvious. He surprised the burglars and they shot him.”
    “Did you see them shoot him?”
    “No. I was behind him on the stairs. By the time I reached the kitchen he was lying on the floor.”
    “And was one of the burglars holding a gun?”
    “No, he could have dropped it. They were packing away the canvases. They’d cut all but one out of their frames. They seemed to want to get out of there quickly once the alarm was triggered.”
    “Yes, that’s another thing I’m confused about.” The detective tossed his trench coat on the spare bed and pulled up a chair.He looked as if he was getting comfortable for a long talk. “The safe alarm was triggered, but the front-door alarm wasn’t. Did anyone else but you and your father know the front-door alarm code?”
    “Several people. Our housekeeper, the receptionist . . . we always kept anything valuable in the safe, so . . .”
    “And who knew that combination?”
    “No one but my father and me. The burglars must have used an explosive . . .” I paused, recalling the moment when the men passed me in the hallway. It wasn’t something I wanted to remember. It made me feel as if something were pressing against my chest. “I smelled something when they walked by. Sulfur . . . and something
burnt
.”
    “There was no sign of an explosion,” the detective said. “They either knew the combination or . . .”
    “Or what?” I snapped.
    He tilted his head and smiled. He was handsome in a boyish, clean-cut manner, I noted in the same numb detachment I’d felt since finding my father shot on the kitchen floor: curly dark hair, square jaw, cleft chin, broad shoulders, deep brown eyes. He was no doubt used to charming women with his looks. But why was he trying to charm
me
? I was the victim here, wasn’t I? “I don’t know,” he said. “You tell me.”
    “I have no idea,” I said truthfully.
    “Could your father have given them the combination?”
    “Only if they forced him at gunpoint.”
    “But you said you were right behind your father on the stairs and they had already cut all but one of the canvases out of their frames. So there wouldn’t have been time for your father to give them the combination. At least not then.”
    It took a moment for his words to sink in, but when they didI was furious. “Are you implying that my father was somehow
in
on the burglary?”
    Detective Kiernan shrugged. “I’m just trying to figure out what happened. Are you sure the safe was locked?”
    “Yes, I went back to the office to do it myself . . .” But I stopped, recalling that after I had walked Zach Reese to the door and come back to the kitchen, my father had already put away the Pissarros and locked the safe door. At least I’d assumed he had. “Actually my father closed the safe when I was seeing a friend to the door—”
    “A friend?”
    “An old friend of my father’s, Zach Reese.”
    “The painter?” Kiernan took a notebook out of his suit jacket pocket. The motion revealed a flash of gun.
    “Yes,” I said, my mouth dry. “So you have to study art to be on the Art Crime squad?”
    “It helps,” he said, his lips curving into a brief, perfunctory smile. “But you wouldn’t have to be an art expert to know Zach Reese’s name. His exploits in the eighties made him pretty famous. There was that car accident out in the Hamptons. A young girl drowned.”
    “Yes, that was awful. I was only a kid at the time, but my mother told me Zach was never the same. He became a heavy drinker—not that he’d been a light drinker before.”
    “And he stopped painting. He ran into some trouble with gambling