When I saw this beetle on the wall of my house, my first thought was that it was an earwig.
It scurried up the wall quite quickly, moving a lot like an earwig, too.
When I got the image onto my computer screen, I saw that it had no forceps--in fact, no visible cerci at all.
My next thought was that it was a reproductive for of a termite whose wings had broken off.
However, I compared it with a termite photo that I had, and found that it was quite different in many respects.
After I got my Peterson Field Guide to beetles, I learned about rove beetles, and decided that it was one of those.
My tentative ID of it as Paederinae is rather arbitrary, and is based on comparing
this rather fuzzy image with some line drawings from books and Web sites.