I climbed out as well, and we stood in the small patch of grass that served as a backyard, quietly studying the rear entrance of the building. A short flight of wooden stairs led up to a whitewashed exterior door. The porch light, fitted with a dim yellow bulb, still burned in the crisp shadows caused by a small overhang jutting from the brick wall to cover the landing.

“The apartment next to hers,” Ben told me, “and the one directly above are currently unoccupied.” He pointed to each of the windows. “The other upstairs apartment belongs to a forty-year-old woman who’s stone deaf. Besides, she wasn’t even home.”

A ghostly flash of noise battered my eardrums for a moment. The briefness and ethereal quality of the mechanical rumble told me it was only in my head, but I knew immediately what it meant.

“And the air conditioner was running,” I stated. “No one could hear her over the noise if she screamed.”

“Yeah,” Ben paused and looked at me sideways. “The other neighbors didn’t hear a thing.” We started walking toward the stairs. “Anyway, the outer doors automatically lock, and there were no visible signs of forced entry, so we assume she either knew the killer and let ‘im in, or he had a key or somethin’ of that sort.”

“Locksmith, maybe,” I offered as we climbed the stairs and came to rest on the landing.

“We’re checking into that,” Ben replied. “The upstairs neighbor was the one that found ‘er when she was comin’ in later that evenin’. Her door was propped open, and the neighbor thought it was a little strange.”

“Deliberately propped open?”

“Looked that way.”

“Odd…” I mused aloud. “That would seem to indicate that whoever did this wanted the body found quickly.”

Taking out a key that had been provided to the police by the landlord, he opened the exterior door, and we stepped into what could be referred to as a small, shared mud room.