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priced out of the neighbourhood. “Twenty-eight grand a month,” he smiled. “The fashion people are moving in. Marc Jacobs is down the street. They pay something like $32,000 a month.”
    The detectives continued to search for cameras. The last place they tried was a giant old house surrounded by a perimeter of lush trees and bushes and guarded by a high iron fence. It looked like something out of a fairy tale. Lazarus rang the bell, but there was no answer. She shouted, “Hello! Police!” No answer. She raised her voice slightly and shouted again. “Hello! Police!”
    The detectives walked around to the rear of the house. They found a door in the fence and slipped into the back garden, which was full of statues and plants packed tightly together. A narrow path led to a back door. They knocked. A Hispanic caregiver answered and invited them inside. The back hallway opened into a yawning room, two floors high. The room was packed full of antiques and paintings. It was chaotic; it looked like the piled-up remains of what once was a thriving antiques business.
    An old woman sat in a chair near a row of television screens filled with images from cameras. Bingo. It turned out that she had just come out of a coma and her health was delicate. A voice somewhere screamed, “Hello. Hello. Hello.” It sounded very much like Detective Lazarus. “It’s a bird,” said Hrycyk. And so it was, in a cage near the front door.
    The detectives took an hour figuring out if the cameras had picked up anything useful, scrolling through tape. Nothing so far. They’d have to come back. Before they left, both Hrycyk and Lazarus had noticed what looked like a Picasso perched carelessly on a cluttered sofa. They inquired about it, and the woman told them it was a genuine Picasso worth a huge sum of money. Hrycyk surreptitiously took a photo of the painting with his cell.
    By the time the detectives climbed back into their Chevrolet Impala, they had spent a total of four hours at the crime scene and canvassing La Cienega. During that four-hour period they had both been standing or walking, but even though they had started their day at dawn, neither seemed tired. The car slipped into a traffic jam on Sunset, which ate up more time. The light cut harshly across the rush-hour traffic. They would drive back to the office to transfer their written notes into a computer file, check messages and updates on other cases, and make a few calls.
    THAT WAS LATE June. Three months passed. In September, Hrycyk received a call from the Los Angeles District Attorney’s office. They’d been following the activities of a gang of Armenians, through an informant working for the DA . The informant had identified the gang for the antique-store job on La Cienega. This was organized crime, not a simple break-and-enter: the Armenian gang was under surveillance because it was involved in a host of criminal activities. The da passed along an address to Hrycyk, for a house they believed the Armenians were using to store, among other material possessions like drugs and money, the antiques stolen from the shop on La Cienega.
    After a search warrant was secured, the house was raided. The DA was right. The search turned up a cache of the stolen loot. It wasn’t everything, though. “We’ve seized that stuff and we’re still looking for the rest,” Hrycyk told me.
    â€œThis particular gang was known for stealing from tobacco stores, so the upscale antique store was new for them. The gang was using the Italian antiques as furniture. That’s the problem with stealing art or antiques. If you don’t know the art market—in this case the Italian antique market—then it’s going to be difficult to move it,” Hrycyk said. “The Armenians weren’t connoisseurs of antique Italian furniture. What they were interested in was money. They’re into anything that is a commodity and that