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room. He had stabbed her with her own knife when she attempted to stab and rob him, according to his statement in the report forwarded by the LAPD’s Hollywood Division. There were minor inconsistencies between Gunn’s original statement to responding patrol officers and the physical evidence but not enough for the district attorney’s office to seek charges against him. Ultimately, the case was reluctantly written off as self-defense and dropped.
    McCaleb noticed that the lead investigator on the case had been Detective Harry Bosch. Years earlier McCaleb had worked with Bosch on a case, an investigation he still often thought about. Bosch had been abrasive and secretive at times, but still a good cop with excellent investigative skills, intuition and instincts. They had actually bonded in some way over the emotional turmoil the case had caused them both. McCaleb wrote Bosch’s name down in the notebook as a reminder to call the detective to see if he had any thoughts on the Gunn case.
    He went back to reading the summaries. With Gunn’s record of prior engagement with a prostitute in mind, Winston’s and Mintz’s next step was to comb through the murder victim’s phone records as well as check and credit card purchases for indications that he might have continued to use prostitutes. There was nothing. They cruised Sunset Boulevard with an LAPD vice crew for three nights, stopping and interviewing street prostitutes. But none admitted knowing the man in the photos the detectives had borrowed from Gunn’s sister.
    The detectives scanned the sex want ads in the local alternative papers for an advertisement Gunn might have placed. One more time their efforts hit a wall.
    Finally, the detectives took the long shot of tracking the family and associates of the dead prostitute of six years before. Although Gunn had never been charged with the killing, there was still a chance someone believed he had not acted in self-defense — someone who might have sought retribution.
    But this, too, was a dead end. The woman’s family was from Philadelphia. They had lost contact years before. No family member had even come out to claim the body before it was cremated at county taxpayers’ expense. There was no reason for them to seek vengeance for a killing six years old when they had not cared much about the killing in the first place.
    The case had hit one investigative dead end after another. A case not solved in the first forty-eight hours had a less than 50 percent chance of being cleared. A case unsolved after two weeks was like an unclaimed body in the morgue — it was going to sit there in the cold and the dark for a long, long time.
    And that was why Winston had finally come to McCaleb. He was the last resort on a hopeless case.
    Finished with the summaries, McCaleb decided to take a break. He checked his watch and saw it was now almost two. He opened the cabin door and went up to the salon. The lights were off. Buddy had apparently gone to bed in the master cabin without making any noise. McCaleb opened the cold box and looked in. There was a six-pack of beer left over from the charter but he didn’t want that. There was a carton of orange juice and some bottled water. He took the water and went out through the salon door to the cockpit. It was always cool on the water but this night seemed crisper than usual. He folded his arms across his chest and looked across the harbor and up the hill to the house where he knew his family slept. A single light shone from the back deck.
    A momentary pang of guilt passed through him. He knew that despite his deep love for the woman and two children behind that light, he would rather be on the boat with the murder book than up there in the sleeping house. He tried to push away these thoughts and the questions they raised but could not completely blind himself to the essential conclusion that there was something wrong with him, something missing. It was something that prevented him from