Meggie stepped back to let her inside. As Claire walked in, she saw that Patrick was sitting on the couch, his legs folded beneath him as he typed on a laptop.

“Good, you’re here too,” Claire said.

“What’s this about?” he asked.

Claire cleared her throat. “I had a couple of questions about Saturday night. Namely, why you lied about what time you got home.”

“Sorry?” Meggie said, her forehead scrunching up. “What are you talking about?”

“You told me that when you arrived home, you saw the blood in the stairwell and on the carpet and decided to go upstairs to make sure everything was okay.”

“Yes,” Meggie said with a frown on her face.

“I took a look at the photos of the entryway and first floor of your apartment building. And it occurred to me: there’s no way for you to see the staircase when you walk in the door. If you walked in and went straight to your apartment, you wouldn’t have seen the blood, and you would’ve had no reason to go upstairs to the third floor. I don’t know about you, but I don’t walk past my apartment and take a look around before going inside. So tell me: Why did you walk over to the staircase?”

“I don’t know,” Meggie said. “We just did. There wasn’t a reason.”

“Of course there was a reason,” Claire said. “There’s a reason for everything, and it is my job to figure out what those reasons are. Here’s what I think. Actually, here’s what I know, since I just made a call to Boxer’s, and with a few threats of taking a closer look at their books, I got the owner, Kerry, to tell me the truth, not the lie you asked her to feed us. You two weren’t at the bar until two fifteen, as you said earlier; instead, she said you left by one thirty. You went in, you met with someone, and then you left, according to Kerry. Which means you were in your apartment before Beverly was killed.”

Meggie and Patrick looked at each other in an obvious effort to determine how much they should reveal. Claire jumped in again before either of them responded.

“I think you were here, and I think you heard something that concerned you. Something that made you scared. Maybe a yell, maybe the sound of someone running down the stairs. But you didn’t open the door and call the police, because you were otherwise occupied. The report came back on the swabs from your apartment, and we found traces of cocaine in the bathroom. Is that what you picked up at Boxer’s?”

Meggie slumped forward, and she rested her forehead against the palm of her head.