Switchblade: An Original Story

The saying goes that hope springs eternal. So too with homicide. At the Los Angeles Police Department, a decade of successes by the Open-Unsolved Unit in closing old and sometimes forgotten murder cases created a steady stream of inquiries from the loved ones of victims. They came from around the world, from any place there was an unquenched desire for justice. Every day came the calls and e-mails and even visits. People asking about cases, hoping to spark the interest of the squad that investigated the past, seeking its hidden killers.

So high was the tide of hope for justice and closure that the OU Unit could not handle all the inquiries and still dedicate the time needed to the actual investigations. The department dug into the budget and hired a sorter — that is, a civilian employee who worked out of the OCP, the Office of the Chief of Police, and sorted through the dozens of requests that came in each week, sometimes each day.

The sorter’s name was Emily Robertson and her main tools for dealing with case inquiries were the department’s murder logs. These leather-bound books contained a chronological list of every murder committed in the City of Angels going back to 1896. One page, one murder. There were more than fifty of these somber volumes on the shelves behind Emily’s desk. When an inquiry came to her or was referred to her— whether it was a phone call, an e-mail, or a walk-in — it was Emily’s job to find the reference to the case in the murder logs. By confirming the case and the year of the crime, Emily then knew which detective team in the Open-Unsolved Unit she should refer the inquiry to for follow-up. Each of the eight teams in the unit was assigned specific years of responsibility. Any unsolved cases from its assigned years went to that detective team.

Sometimes the follow-up took weeks, sometimes months. Every detective in the unit carried a sizable caseload, with investigations under way at varying stages. With more than six thousand unsolved murders on the books, there was no shortage of work. If the referred case proved workable — that is, if there was evidence that bore analysis with contemporary technologies and investigative techniques — then Emily would step out of the picture as the detectives took over. If the review of the case determined that there was no means of proceeding or evidence to analyze, then it was referred back to Emily, who had the difficult task of informing a family or a loved one that the case still remained unsolved and unworkable — a dead end.

Detective Harry Bosch enjoyed the sight of Emily Robertson when she came into the squad room each Friday morning with the week’s sorting of inquiries. Not only did it mean the possibility of fresh cases for him to work, but he also liked talking with Emily. She was an attractive woman of about forty. She was too young for Bosch, though he could still think about it.

The main attraction for Bosch, however, was that she spoke with emotional fervor about the cases she had sorted and the people who had come to her. She was the gateway between people whose questions had gone unanswered for so long and the detectives they hoped would bring resolution. The bottom line was that although Emily was not a detective, she understood the mission. That everybody counted or nobody counted. She seemed to take every case to heart, and that was a pitch over the plate to Harry Bosch. Indeed, the word around the squad was that Emily had seen a newspaper story announcing the sorting position and left a successful career as a legal secretary to take the job at a considerable reduction in pay.

The Billy Ratliff case began for Bosch with Emily. On a Friday morning more than a year ago, she entered the OU squad room with the usual stack of green files she had prepared, one for each case she had sorted. Bosch watched her from his cubicle and waited. His partner that day was on vacation, so Harry waited patiently by himself to see if a file or two would come to him. Emily made her way around the room, dispensing files, sometimes with a conversation, sometimes leaving a file on an empty desk because the corresponding detectives were out in the field or off duty.

She waited to come to Bosch last. She had one file left in her hand when she arrived at his cubicle.

“Good morning, Detective Bosch.”

“Good morning, Emily. When are you going to start calling me Harry?”

“I’m sorry. I always forget. Harry.”

She nodded, as if trying the name out and seeing if it worked.

“What do you have there?”

She handed him the green file.

“There is not a lot in there. This one was anonymous — came in yesterday. He didn’t say much but I was able to find the case. Nineteen ninety-two. One of your years.”

“Sure is.”

Bosch opened the file. It contained only two sheets of paper. One was a photocopy of the page from the murder log where she had found the case recorded. The other page was just a few notes from the anonymous call she had received. Bosch read this page first.

That was it. Bosch looked up at Emily and smiled.

“You know, maybe next time you get one of these, you should transfer it down here,” he said. “This doesn’t sound like a family member. This is a tip and it should’ve gone to the tip line, where officers take the info and can ask questions, or if it’s an old case like this, just transfer it down here.”

She nodded.

“I know, I know. I tried to put him on hold so I could transfer the call and he said he wouldn’t hold. He said, ‘I told you all I have to say,’ and then he hung up.”

Bosch frowned.

“And you think you got the name right?”

“I think so. He said it twice. He said, ‘Patrick Sewell killed that boy. Patrick Sewell.’”

“Okay. So he gave the suspect’s full name twice but only a partial on the victim’s. Just Billy.”

“Right. And there were a lot of murders in the nineties. I started looking through them all until I saw the name. They didn’t know who it was at first, then they updated it with the name. William Ratliff. I think this is the case. I didn’t find any other unsolved cases in the Hollywood area with a victim named Billy or William.”

Bosch nodded again and looked back down at the file to read the entries on the log page.

Bosch knew that the famed Old Hollywood restaurant where the body had been found had been destroyed during the 1992 riots. It stood partially intact afterward but was abandoned except by the homeless for almost another two years before being leveled and turned into a parking lot.

Bosch distantly remembered the murder as the Brown Derby case. This was not because of any involvement on his part in the investigation in 1992 but because he had reviewed the stored evidence and case records — contained in a binder called a murder book — when he was assigned to the Open-Unsolved Unit and given responsibility for the year 1992. He rated the cases he reviewed on a scale of one to five, with a five designation meaning there was highly viable forensic evidence that could be followed up on. But his memory at the moment was that he had rated the Brown Derby case a one or a two after he ran fingerprints collected at the crime scene and got no matches in the data banks, where millions of prints were stored. He didn’t recall there being any DNA or other evidence worth pursuing using modern technology and science.

Below the initial entry was a short second paragraph added to the log by Homicide detectives Rodgers and Quinlan after an initial assessment of the case and identification of the victim had been confirmed.

The second entry meant that the nineteen-year-old victim had been identified through fingerprints that matched those taken during multiple arrests for prostitution and soliciting. It also mentioned that the Scientific Investigation Division was processing all evidence from the crime scene. The shorthand on the entry indicated this included all collected fingerprints, the victim’s clothing, a switchblade knife that may have been the murder weapon, and the tape that had been used to bind him.

“What do you think?”

Bosch looked up at Emily, who was still standing next to his cubicle.

“Well,” he said. “I remember this case and—”

“You were a detective in ’92?”

There was genuine surprise in her voice.

“It was only twenty years ago,” he said, smiling. “I actually was on the homicide table at Hollywood Division and worked with these guys, Rodgers and Quinlan. But it wasn’t my case, and that’s not why I remember it. What I meant was that I remember reviewing this case when I was transferred to this unit and ’92 became one of my years. I looked through all the open cases from that year. There were a lot. We had the riots that year. Anyway, I looked at this one and I don’t remember there being any workable leads. I don’t remember this name — Patrick Sewell — being in the file.”

“Okay. Is there anything you can do with it?”

Bosch shrugged.

“I’ll follow up, see if I can find out who this guy Patrick Sewell is and go from there.”

“Okay.”

“Meantime, if the anonymous tipster calls you again, try to get him to me. Tell him a detective needs to talk to him.”

“Okay, I will.”

“Thanks, Emily. You have a good day.”

“You too, Harry.”

Bosch smiled because she had used his first name.

The evidence box from archives took three days to get to Bosch after he formally made the request. By then he had already pulled the murder book from the Records Division and reviewed the case again. Billy Ratliff was a homeless kid who ended up on the streets of Hollywood at age fifteen. He was small in stature with blond hair and a toothy smile. He fell in with a group of fellow runaways who squatted in abandoned apartments and buildings and sometimes lived in city parks and homeless shelters. They were drug users and panhandlers and prostitutes. Billy was known to engage in all three activities and was in and out of juvenile halls and then jails after he turned eighteen. He always came back to the boulevard and the so-called “rat pack” in which he eventually served, as the oldest, in the capacity of alpha male.

The investigative theory contained in the murder book was that Billy’s street life took a fatal turn when he crossed paths with a psychopath who took him into the kitchen of a closed restaurant for an exchange of sex for money or drugs. According to the autopsy report, Ratliff was stabbed seven times in the chest and torso with a rage and ferocity that were evidenced by indentations in the wounds made by the hilt of the killer’s knife. The murder was classified as a hate crime because a psychological profile of the killing drawn up by a department shrink concluded that it was likely motivated by homophobic rage.

No next-of-kin notification was ever made in the case. Members of the rat pack provided little investigative help about the crime and were not even sure where Ratliff was from, though records at a youth shelter called My Friend’s Place had a file on Ratliff that said he was from Long Beach. Rodgers and Quinlan could never locate anyone from Billy Ratliff’s family. Nobody claimed his body and it was cremated at taxpayers’ expense.

Nowhere in the murder book did Bosch find the name Patrick Sewell. It never came up in interviews and wasn’t in the routine harvest of names of local miscreants and possible suspects known to be operating in the Hollywood area at the time. The detectives also pulled lists of suspects in other hate crimes that occurred in Hollywood in the previous year and nowhere did Sewell come up on the radar.

Despite there being no mention of Sewell in the murder book, Bosch had no trouble tracking him down twenty years later. A check of law enforcement databases spit out a Patrick Sewell serving a life sentence at San Quentin for a murder committed in Orange County four years after the Billy Ratliff killing. Bosch requested the case records from the Orange County District Attorney’s Office and learned that the murder Sewell was in prison for was the stabbing of a man Sewell had picked up at a gay bar in Irvine.

The case had several similarities to the Ratliff murder, most notably that both victims had been homosexuals stabbed with a switchblade and that rage was clearly part of the motivation. In the Orange County case, Sewell had stabbed the victim with such force that at one point his hand slipped over the hilt of the knife and he cut himself, transferring his own blood to the victim and leaving the evidence that would help convict him.

This gave Bosch an idea. Ratliff had been cremated, so there was no going to the interred body to look for evidence. But according to the evidence report in the murder book, the switchblade had been found at the crime scene submerged in an industrial-size sink full of rancid water. It was surmised that the suspect had attempted to clean the weapon in the dark waters of the sink and left it there in panic or so that he would not be found in possession of it.

When the stored evidence from the Ratliff case arrived from archives, Bosch found that the sealed box contained the switchblade along with Ratliff’s clothes and the gray duct tape that had been used to bind and gag him. Bosch’s name was on the chain-of-custody receipt on the box. He had been the last one to open it seven years before while he was reviewing unsolved cases from the years assigned to him.

Back then he was quickly going through cases, looking for obvious investigative points of origin such as fingerprints and DNA sources. This time was different. This time he would go deeper. He had a clue to work with now.

Bosch took the entire box to the Regional Crime Lab, where he left its contents with various experts — the clothing to be viewed under lighting that would make body fluids fluoresce, the duct tape to be checked by specialists using new methods to expose fingerprints and fibers, and the switchblade to be examined by a DNA expert.

The knife was most intriguing to Bosch. Though ostensibly cleaned by the killer and left submerged in contaminated water for an estimated nineteen hours — the span from time of death to discovery of the body by a city inspector and then the draining of the sink by a crime scene tech — there was still a chance that microscopic DNA could be found on the weapon. The knife was cheaply made and stamped HECHO EN MEXICO on the blade. It had been found in the closed position, meaning sometime between the murder and the weapon’s abandonment it had been closed, presumably by the killer. Bosch pointed this out to the DNA intake tech he brought it to and asked him to check the channel in the knife’s handle where the blade was hidden when not extended.

A week later Bosch received a call at his desk from a criminalist at the crime lab. His name was Jack Hardy and he said he had been given the task of disassembling the switchblade from the Ratliff case.

“I got good news for you, Detective,” he said. “We found DNA in the handle.”

“That’s great. Is there enough for comparison?”

“We think so. We’re going to put together a package for the DOJ.”

Bosch knew that all DNA analysis in criminal matters was handled by the California Department of Justice lab in Sacramento. The wait for results could be interminable.

“How long before we hear back?” he asked, even though he suspected he would not receive an encouraging response.

“Six months,” Hardy said. “Three if we’re lucky.”

“The guy who I think did this comes up on his first parole hearing on another murder in five months. He’s up at San Quentin. The way they let people out these days, I’d hate to see this guy get out before we can hit him with this.”

“I hear you. I’ll see what I can do to speed things along.”

The regional lab in L.A. had to be one of the DOJ lab’s biggest and most important customers. People knew people between the facilities and sometimes favors could be done. Bosch hoped for the best, but that was all he could do. He had taken the Ratliff case as far as he could take it. Now it was time to wait on it while he worked other cases. This was the routine in the Open-Unsolved Unit. A lot of irons in the fire at all times. Bosch waited for the science to deliver while he moved on to a different case.

The next time Emily Robertson came through the squad room with that week’s sorting, Bosch updated her on where things stood with the case. He said it was a long shot but at least they had a shot.

She seemed pleased. She even called him Harry after he gave her the update.

It took the DOJ lab four months to return a verdict. DNA from the switchblade had been matched to two people: William Ratliff and Patrick Sewell.

Bosch could not have asked for a better result. Blood from both the victim and the suspect were found on the murder weapon. It looked like a slam dunk. Bosch took what he had to the District Attorney’s Office to request that a murder charge be lodged against Sewell. He spoke with a deputy DA named Lionel Dupree, who was in the pool of prosecutors assigned to cold cases because of the unique challenges they posed at trial. The Lion, as Dupree was called by the cops in OU, did not call it a slam dunk.

“It’s not even a layup,” he told Bosch. “Science can be challenged — how was that switchblade stored? how many people had access to it over twenty years? what about the deterioration of the specimen while it was in the sink? — and don’t get me started on test contamination up at DOJ. You get a good lawyer and there could be a hundred challenges to this, Harry. And believe me, when it comes to murder cases with death-penalty risk, they’re all good lawyers.”

“So you’re not going to file?” Bosch said incredulously. “I thought you were ‘the Lion’—not afraid of any case.”

“No, I didn’t say I won’t file. And I’m not afraid of this or any other case. I just want to be bulletproof when we go into court. I want more than DNA.”

“So what do I do? The case is old. This is what I’ve got.”

“First of all, you go up to the Q and see this guy, see if you can get an admission. And second — and this is the big one — find the witness.”

“What witness?”

“Whoever it was who called in and put this guy’s name on this. They have to have seen or heard something. They gave Sewell’s name and they were right. Find me that caller and then we probably have a slam dunk here.”

Bosch nodded reluctantly. He knew the Lion was right when it came to making cases but sometimes you had what you had and you needed to roll the dice. He left the DA’s Office disappointed and knowing the case might stall out. For Dupree, as long as Sewell was in prison on the other killing, it didn’t make sense to move ahead with a risky prosecution.

One week after Bosch met with Lionel Dupree he was sitting in a visiting room in the Adjustment Center at the California State Prison at San Quentin. The AC was so named in the nineteenth century because it was the building where new inmates were oriented to the prison’s rules and routines, and it was now also where law enforcement interviews took place. Patrick Sewell was taken from his job in the prison’s mattress factory and brought to Bosch for the interview. Bosch had had a long time to consider how he would play the inmate and had even written out a script which he’d edited and then committed to memory.

Sewell was surprisingly small for a killer of men. Bosch had his file on the table in front of him and knew he was exactly five foot six and 130 pounds. He had brown hair and glasses and had a thin smile on his face. It was a phony sort of smile designed to cloak true intentions. He wore a baggy blue shirt and pants, the color status meaning he had achieved a level of trust inside the prison that allowed him certain freedoms within its twenty-five-foot stone walls. It also meant that he was on a pathway toward parole. Bosch’s script would play on that.

“Patrick, I’m Detective Harry Bosch from the Los Angeles Police Department. How are you doing today?”

Sewell paused before speaking. He presumably had no idea what Bosch was there for.

“I’m doing okay,” he finally said.

“Good. How are you set for your parole hearing next month?”

Sewell shrugged.

“I’m ready, I guess.”

“The captain tells me you’ve been a model prisoner. You must want to get out very badly.”

“I don’t think there’s anybody who wants to be here.”

Bosch nodded.

“That’s true, Patrick. You know if they turn you down, you don’t get another shot for two years. Then if they turn you down again, it’s four years. Best chance is the first shot.”

“What do you want, Mr. LAPD?”

“What I want is to ask you about some years and some specific dates and to see if you can remember where you were and what you might’ve seen during those times.”

“What if I don’t want to answer?”

“You don’t have to. But here’s the trick. If you don’t answer me, that’s called being uncooperative. And that’s going to go in your jacket, and those three parole board members next month are going to know it. Not sure you want that, since I see you got fifteen years in already.”

“Sixteen.”

“My mistake. Sixteen.”

“What dates are you talking about?”

“Well, first let’s do this right.”

Bosch reached into his suit pocket to retrieve his mini voice recorder. He put it down on the table between them and turned it on. He then identified himself and Sewell as well as their location and the date of the recording. Then, reading from a card he had also pulled from a pocket, he gave Sewell the Miranda warning, notifying him of his right to an attorney during the questioning that was to follow. Sewell, wanting to be cooperative, waived his rights and agreed to answer questions. Bosch went right to the script he had committed to memory.

“Mr. Sewell, have you ever been in Los Angeles?”

“Of course. Many times.”

“Did you ever live there?”

“Not really. I stayed with friends every now and then but I never paid rent or anything like that.”

“When were the times you stayed with friends?”

“Oh, I don’t know. It’s hard to remember after so many years. It was on and off.”

“Was it near the time of your arrest and incarceration in 1996?”

“It could’ve been. I don’t remember.”

“What about before that, earlier in the nineties?”

“I’m sure I was there. In and out.”

“Did you know an individual named William Ratliff? He was known as Billy by his friends.”

“Who now?”

“William Ratliff. He went by Billy.”

“No, I didn’t know anybody who went by Billy.”

“Are you sure?”

“I’m sure.”

“Where’d you live in 1992?”

“’Ninety-two? That’s way back. In ’92 I was still living part of the time in my mother’s place in Tustin.”

“What about the other part of the time?”

“Uh, you know, around. I’d stay with friends. You know, in and out.”

“When would you go to Los Angeles?”

“Los Angeles? Like on weekends every now and then.”

“Did you drive up there?”

“Yeah, I had a car.”

“So you were in Los Angeles in 1992?”

“I don’t remember exactly. It’s a long—”

“Ever in Hollywood?”

“I don’t remember.”

“I’ve read your application for parole.”

“You’re allowed to do that?”

“Yes, Patrick, the department of probation and parole allowed me to see it. And I see in the candidate’s comments section that you take full responsibility for the crime that put you up here.”

“Yes. I told them I’m sorry.”

“So you are admitting you did it? At your trial you denied it all the way.”

Bosch was drawing Sewell into a corner. In order to get paroled, he had to acknowledge his crimes and hope that his confession would be seen by the board as part of his rehabilitation and redemption.

“I am admitting that I had poor self-control and that I acted out. It cost an innocent man his life and for that I am very sorry.”

“Where did you buy the switchblade you killed that innocent man with?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean exactly what I said. Where did you buy the switchblade? You killed the victim in ’96 with a switchblade. Daniel Hunter, a gay man you picked up in a bar. You went to his apartment and stabbed him repeatedly with a switchblade and you admitted as much in your application for parole.”

Bosch paused. Sewell didn’t say anything.

“Now, I want to know where you got the switchblade, Patrick. You told me you were cooperating here.”

The pause continued. Sewell eyes stared cold and hard at Bosch because he knew it was one thing that could not be recorded on Bosch’s micro-recorder and used against him.

“In TJ,” he finally said. “They sold them there cheap.”

“Tijuana,” Bosch said. “Did you go there a lot?”

“Not too much. When I got the urge.”

“The urge to travel or the urge to buy a switchblade?”

“The urge for authentic Mexican food.”

“When did you buy the knife?”

“I don’t remember.”

“Did you buy more than one down there, Patrick?”

“Just the one, as far as I remember.”

“You sure about that?”

“Pretty sure.”

“Did you stab Billy Ratliff with a switchblade you bought in Mexico?”

“No, don’t be crazy. The answer is no.”

“Were you in Los Angeles on February 9, 1992?”

“How am I supposed to remember something like that?”

“Yes or no?”

“I don’t remember!”

“There is a witness who tells us you killed Billy Ratliff.”

“That is bullshit!”

“No, he says you killed him. You stabbed him with a switchblade just like you stabbed Daniel Hunter. Both of them gay, both of them stabbed with a cheap switchblade from Tijuana. It was you.”

“No, you’re wrong and you can’t prove a thing. What witness? There was no witness.”

“Yeah, how do you know there was no witness?”

Sewell realized he was skirting too close to an admission.

“Look,” he said. “You’re trying to pin this on me because I got a parole hearing coming up. I’m trying to cooperate but you’re accusing me and there isn’t one shred of evidence against me.”

“Depends on what you consider a shred.”

The convict stared at Bosch for a long moment.

“And what’s that mean?”

“It means the smallest shred in the world connects you to Ratliff. We’ve got DNA. On the murder weapon. You stabbed him so hard your fingers slipped over the hilt and you cut yourself. Just like with Hunter.”

Sewell shook his head.

“You are lying. I wasn’t even there.”

“The science doesn’t lie. You can forget parole, Sewell. You can forget everything. This time we’re going for the death penalty. You want to save yourself from that, then you talk. You tell everything. You’ll never get out of here but you’ll be alive.”

“Fuck you, liar. You wouldn’t even be here if you had a case. I’m out of here.”

He stood up and started calling for the guard.

Before Bosch left the Adjustment Center, he got the names of every prisoner who had ever shared a cell with Sewell. He figured the tip to the sorter had to have come from someone he had bragged to about his crimes. Bosch would start with the cell mates.

The next month, Sewell was denied parole after the three-member board heard a presentation from the Orange County District Attorney’s Office that included graphic details of the murder of Daniel Hunter and also news that Sewell’s DNA had been linked to a homicide being worked as a cold case in Los Angeles.

The denial meant Sewell would remain safely behind prison walls for at least the next two years. This took some of the urgency off Bosch but he still worked the case as a hobby, slowly making his way down the list of forty-one cell mates Sewell had had over his years at San Quentin. Some were dead but most were incarcerated in other prisons and jails, which made them easy to get to. Bosch sometimes piggybacked interviews with them while conducting interviews on other cases that came and went.

Ten months passed before Bosch checked the last name off the list. He had found no one who made the call to the Open-Unsolved Unit’s public line. He visited the Lion at the DA’s Office to try to persuade him to go ahead with the case, even though DNA would be the only hard evidence. He argued that the circumstantial evidence — the similarities between the Hunter and Ratliff murders, Sewell’s evasiveness during the San Quentin interview — would help win the day in court, but Dupree was unmoved. He stuck to the argument that as long as Sewell was in prison, there was no need to mount a potentially risky and costly prosecution. He fortified this with the fact that Sewell’s first parole request had been denied, an indicator he was not going anywhere, and the hope that the longer they waited the better the chance that the anonymous caller might come to light.

On a slow day at the start of the new year, Bosch took a ride down to Santa Ana and the Orange County DA’s Office. He asked to see Ken McDowell, the deputy DA who prosecuted Sewell back in 1996. The two men had never spoken in person, though McDowell was aware of Bosch’s efforts and had been the prosecutor who appeared at Sewell’s first parole hearing to urge that he not be released.

Bosch explained to McDowell where the case was and why it was stalled.

“I’m grasping at straws here,” Bosch said.

McDowell, who was now the head deputy DA, shook his head and said he couldn’t help Bosch.

“It’s weird, though,” he said. “Our case started the same way.”

“What do you mean?” Bosch asked.

“Anonymous tip. Somebody — it was a woman — called the OC sheriff’s tip line and said the guy we’re looking for in that Irvine stabbing was Patrick Sewell. We took it from there, but we never did find out who the lady was who made the call.”

Bosch had not seen that in the abbreviated records he had received from Orange County at the start of his investigation. He asked McDowell if he could look at the full file on the case, and the prosecutor allowed him permission as long as he didn’t remove any records from the office. Bosch made the deal and spent the afternoon in an unused and windowless conference room looking through two cardboard file boxes.

Near the back of the second box was a copy of the presentencing report prepared on Sewell before he was sentenced for the murder of Daniel Hunter. Bosch learned many details about Sewell’s life that he’d been unaware of. He learned that when Sewell was a child, his father had abandoned the family after revealing that he was homosexual. He also learned that as an adult Sewell had had his own troubled marriage.

On the second Friday in February, Bosch invited Emily Robertson for lunch at Pete’s Café, a restaurant heavily favored by police and civilians who worked out of the nearby Police Administration Building. They engaged in simple conversation on the short walk over from the PAB. It was only after they were seated at the restaurant and Bosch looked over the lunch specials that he realized it was Valentine’s Day.

He became flustered, thinking that Emily would get the wrong idea. She was at least twenty years younger, and even the idea of a relationship seemed inappropriate. Bosch thought maybe people in the restaurant would think she was his daughter or his secretary. Either way it didn’t matter. What was important was that Emily not misunderstand.

“Emily, I know it’s Valentine’s Day but that’s not why I asked you to lunch.”

“Oh?”

“Yes, I asked you because I wanted to talk to you about work-related things.”

“What things?”

“Well, actually, one thing. One case. Patrick Sewell.”

Her eyes widened.

“Are they going to prosecute?”

“Uh, that hasn’t been decided. Take a look at this.”

From his inside suit coat pocket Bosch withdrew a folded document. He flattened it on the table and slid it over for her to see. She looked at it but seemed confused.

“What is this?” she asked.

“It’s a marriage license,” Bosch said. “Your marriage license from 1995, when you married Patrick Sewell.”

Emily bowed her head.

“I don’t want to cause you any more upset than is necessary, Emily,” Bosch said quickly. “But I need to know what’s going on.”

He waited. She said nothing. She didn’t look up at him.

“You married Patrick Sewell in ’95 and divorced him eight months later in ’96—the same year he killed Daniel Hunter. He was arrested in ’96 after an anonymous caller — a woman — put detectives onto him. That was you, wasn’t it?”

Emily nodded without looking up.

“Two years ago, when you brought me the green file with the tip about Sewell and the Billy Ratliff murder, that was you again.”

“Yes.”

The voice was weak, the head still down.

“Emily, look at me. Please.”

She finally looked up at him. Her eyes were filled with tears, threatening the carefully drawn eyeliner. Bosch felt that they were attracting stares from the other Valentine’s Day couples in the restaurant but he didn’t care.

“There was no anonymous call to Open-Unsolved,” he said. “You made that up.”

“Yes.”

“Why then? Why did you wait so long?”

“He was going to come up for parole. I had to try to do something.”

She explained that after she and Sewell got married, she learned very quickly that he was mentally imbalanced and carried a deep-seated rage over his father’s abandonment and the reasons behind it. He told Emily that growing up, there were times when the rage overcame him and he acted out. In one emotional moment he spoke of killing a homosexual teenager named Billy in Hollywood.

Emily never got any more details about the supposed murder. Years later, at the same time she began to worry that Sewell would be set free through parole, she saw a newspaper story about the success of the Open-Unsolved Unit and the department’s plan to hire a civilian to help deal with the massive number of inquiries that came in each year.

“I thought it would give me access to the records and I would be able to look for the case,” she said.

“I don’t understand,” Bosch said. “Why didn’t you just call in the tip like you did before in Orange County? Why change careers? Why go at it by yourself?”

“Because I wanted to. I had to do it myself to make up for not saying anything for so long. I guess I was afraid of him, even in prison. I still am. He knew I had made the call before. He sent me a letter from prison saying he knew.”

Bosch wanted to know more about why she had done things the way she did but he also knew his first responsibility was to make a case, to bring the Lion what he needed to go forward with a trial.

“What did he tell you about Billy?”

“He told me he got retribution once. That’s what he called it. Retribution for his father. He said the victim’s name was even Billy — that was his father’s name. He called it turkey hunting in Hollywood. He said he tied him up and carved him like a turkey in a restaurant kitchen.”

“Where was this when he told you?”

“In bed one morning. That’s when he would talk to me. A lot of times he was talking about fantasies and things that were not real. I thought the story about Billy was just another one of his weird fantasies. But then after I saw blood on Patrick’s clothes and then found out about the boy in Irvine who was killed, I realized at least some of his stories were real.”

“Were there any other details that you can remember?”

“No, everything I told you was everything he said.”

“You’ll have to testify against him.”

“I can’t. I don’t want to be in the same room with him.”

“You have to, Emily. No choice. In less than a year he gets another shot at parole.”

“I was married to him.”

“Doesn’t matter. The spousal exclusion doesn’t apply.”

She nodded. She already knew the law. She looked down again and whispered.

“Okay, Harry. I’ll do it.”

Bosch nodded. It was time to call the Lion.