The file’s chronology followed the detectives from the moment they were given the case to the moment they made their conclusions, noting the reports, interviews, and tips that came to them along the way. Brenae’s suicide boiled down to a series of steps and calculations, her fate and character reconstructed in hindsight. A twenty-two-year-old woman. A woman mostly estranged from her family, except for her musician brother. A student who, according to one witness, “had a talent for controversy.” A student who had been given the world last spring with a rare full scholarship to LAAC, and who had gone from exceeding her professors’ expectations to missing weeks of classes and failing to turn in assignments.

The interview with Hal Giroux halted me for a while. He didn’t sound like a man covering up his own guilt. But what about the guilt of someone else? Why wouldn’t he look harder into the situation that Brenae presented to him, instead of essentially cutting her off? Wasn’t that his job as director of his program? There were interviews with other professors as well, including a female instructor who claimed she’d brought Brenae’s lapses to Hal’s attention, and that Brenae had started catching up on her missed work before she shot herself. “She was digging herself out, but I think when she realized she was going to finish the year with Bs and Cs, she just gave up,” the instructor reflected. “She could only be a star or a failure, and nothing in between.”

The file’s forensic information I found overwhelming and hard to read. Brenae’s wounds were numbered, and there was only one that mattered: the shot that killed her. Otherwise, she’d had two small bruises, one on her right ankle and one on her left thigh. No signs of any sexual penetration. I didn’t understand all the abbreviations, but the medical examiner’s report indicated temazepam in her bloodstream—which I already knew about from the newspaper accounts—and described the trajectory of the bullet from under her chin through the top of her skull. Time of death was somewhere between midnight and 4:00 a.m., the day before she was found. The gun had only her fingerprints on it.

Two students—reluctant to admit they’d been sleeping together in one of their studios—confirmed a loud noise in the early hours of Thursday morning, though they didn’t suspect it was a gun firing. “It sounded like a pop,” said one student. “We thought someone was setting off fireworks.”

The property and evidence report cataloged objects in Brenae’s studio, from crumpled tissues in the wastebasket to a metal safe to her bloody pillow.