Her phone records revealed little. Brenae’s landline and prepaid cell had few calls out, mostly to her brother Davi in her last month. Her only registered e-mail was the school e-mail address, and here, too, she had minimal interactions beyond setting up meetings and responding (or not responding) to assignments. Her laptop held more clues. A Friendster page surfaced. Brenae had 111 friends and posted stills from her videos. Three were from her After-Parties video. The stills showed clusters of mostly young, hip people in the light-soaked L.A. night. But After-Parties wasn’t in the contents of her hard drive. Nor was Lesson in Red. In fact, as the interview with Hal had disclosed, it appeared as if someone had gotten to her computer twenty-four hours before she was found and erased and shredded some data. Most people think if they erase a file, it’s deleted from a computer, but actually only the pathway is deleted, not the data. It takes effort and software to shred. It takes a person so anxious to hide something, they will make sure it is gone. Computer forensics identified the time it was done: Thursday at 8:00 p.m. According to the coroner, Brenae died in the early morning hours on Thursday. She was found on Friday.

The report contained so much information, it would take me many more hours to pore over it all. And yet a team of qualified professionals had scoured Brenae’s existence for why she died, and they’d come up with one clear conclusion: she planned her own exit, and she took it alone. I don’t know why this depressed me the most. Murder wouldn’t have been better, but someone else’s jealousy or rage was easier to swallow than Brenae’s abject despair.

An hour before I was supposed to meet Ray, I put down the case file, showered, pulled on the suit, smoothed my hair back into a clip, and stepped to the mirror. My lower half was as sleek as a seal, but I didn’t know what to do about my obtrusively wholesome, sincere face. Eye makeup wouldn’t help; it tended to turn me into a sad clown. It was too late to sculpt my brows to arched lines. Darker lipstick would have to do. I swiped my mouth. Too red. Blood red. I cleaned it off and put on a lighter shade. Fake pink. Garish. I scoured my lips with a tissue. Darker again. Berry brown. A Gorgon’s mouth. I rubbed it off. Went for a gloss, smearing a little too hard. The glisten sickened me. I pushed myself away from the mirror and opened the bathroom window, taking gulping breaths. Even without grisly crime photos, the facts were enough. I saw Brenae lying on that mattress, her head an exploded nest of blood.