“None at all?”

“Nope,” he said. “Wiped clean. Still some traces of blood and hair, which are a match for Beverly Brighton.”

Claire nodded. “What else?”

“Got the results back on that red stain on the carpet next to the body,” he said, dropping the folder on Claire’s desk and then grabbing a seat beside her. Claire opened it as he continued to speak. “Definitely wasn’t blood. It was lipstick, and very fresh. It was still tacky; the techs say it couldn’t have been there for more than a few hours when we found it. We compared it to the lipstick found on Beverly and—”

“It was a match,” Claire said, looking up. She frowned. “Doesn’t make sense.”

“What doesn’t?” Greg asked.

“Why she put lipstick back on. According to her husband, she was in the shower when he got upstairs from the dinner party. Why shower and then reapply lipstick?”

They were silent for a few moments until Claire spoke again. “Okay, any other presents for me?”

Greg gestured toward the file folder. “It’s in there too,” he said. “So, remember I told you about the keypad lock on the backyard gate? Well, we checked the log, and nobody used it to get into the backyard that night.”

“So nobody got in that way,” she said, leaning forward and putting her head in her hands. “Damn it.”

“What’s wrong?” Greg asked.

Claire continued to stare at the desk, thinking as she spoke out loud.

“Since we first arrived at the scene, I knew that someone who’d already been in the building was responsible for Beverly Brighton’s death. That was clear to me the moment we saw the broken glass with no evidence that someone had actually come in that way. A real intruder wouldn’t work overtime to make it look like they broke in. So it had to be someone who was already in the building around one thirty or two o’clock, when Beverly was killed.