“The date on the eggs was probably the date she had boiled them,” Bosch said. “You know, so she could tell the boiled ones from the others and she’d know how old they were. And it just hit me then. You don’t boil a bunch of eggs so they’re ready for when you want them and then go kill yourself. I mean, what’s the point?”

“So it was a hunch.”

“More than that.”

“But you just knew. Homicide.”

“It changed things. We started to look at things differently. We began a homicide investigation. It took a few days but we got it. Friends told us about some guy who was giving her trouble. Harassing her, stalking her because she turned him down on a date. We asked around the apartment and we started looking at the apartment manager.”

“Shit, I shoulda guessed it was him.”

“We talked to him and he fucked up just enough for us to convince a judge to sign a search warrant. In his place we found the notebook that the supposed suicide note had been torn from. It was like a diary where she wrote down her thoughts and things. This guy found a page where she was talking about life being bad and knew he could use it as a suicide note. We found other stuff that was hers.”

“Why’d he keep the stuff?”

“Because people are stupid, that’s why, Chastain. You want clever killers, watch TV. He kept the stuff because he never thought we’d think it wasn’t a suicide. And because he was in the notebook. She wrote about him stalking her, about how she was sort of flattered and scared of him at the same time. He probably got off on reading it. He kept it.”

“When’s the trial?”

“Couple months.”

“Sounds like a slam dunk.”

“Yeah, we’ll see. So was O.J.”

“What did he do, drug her somehow, then put her in the tub and cut her?”

“He was letting himself in her apartment when she was out. There was stuff in the diary about her thinking someone had been creeping her place. She was a runner — did three miles a day. We think that was when he liked to go in. She had prescription painkillers in the medicine cabinet — she got hurt playing racquetball a couple years before. We think he took the pills on one of his visits and dissolved them in orange juice. The next time he went in he poured it into the juice bottle in her fridge. He knew her habits, knew that after jogging she liked to sit on the steps out front, drink her juice and cool down. She may have realized she had been drugged and looked around for help. It was him who came. He took her back inside.”

“He rape her first?”

Bosch shook his head.

“He probably tried but he couldn’t get it up.”