That narrowed her suspects down to six people: Meggie Bentley and her boyfriend, Patrick; Emma Bentley; Andrew Brighton, the husband; Joshua Burlap, the store owner; and the artist with the red shoe. They’d all left at different times. Any one of them could have waited in the building and confronted Beverly in the hallway.

But why?

The broken glass also told her that the murder hadn’t been planned; the botched cover-up job would’ve immediately been ruled out if the killer had taken even a moment to think about it. No, it was a messy, last-minute attempt to cover up Beverly’s murder, which only cemented Claire’s suspicion that the crime was closer to home than the killer wanted them to think.

Was it a crime of passion?

An accident?

The interviews she’d conducted so far had been telling as well. Unless she was a great actor, Emma Bentley seemed truly shaken up about her friend’s death. And she’d seemed a bit too eager to name Patrick as a potential suspect; Claire had the sense that the woman wasn’t the biggest fan of her sister’s boyfriend. Meggie Bentley hadn’t done a great job hiding her dislike for the victim, but then again, she hadn’t really been trying to. And then there was Andrew Brighton, who’d apparently spent the last hour hanging over a toilet bowl. Pretty accurate reaction for what he’d been through that night, but was there more to it than that?

The men had successfully navigated Beverly’s body around the last corner and were heading down to the first floor. Claire closed her notebook and moved toward the staircase. As she did, she heard someone call her name.

“Puhl?”

It was Greg, and Claire looked over the bannister to see him peering up at her from the first floor. He waited for the two men to pass him and then jogged quickly up the steps toward her.

“Yes?” Claire said as he reached the landing.

“The building is locked up pretty tight. There are three ways to get into it. The front door, the back door, and up the back staircase, which takes you into the back door of each unit. That backyard has a locked gate, which requires a code to be opened up from the outside.”

“Is there a way to determine if that system was used tonight?”

“Yep. We’ve already reached out to the landlord,” he said. “Oh, and we found the brick that was used to smash the window. It was lying in a puddle of mud, so don’t think we’re going to find any prints on it, but we’ll see.”

“Good.” Claire nodded her head up the stairs. “I’m going to go speak with the husband.”