Free When All The Girls Have Gone by Jayne Ann Krentz

for dinner at one of the downtown restaurants.
    The residents of the neighborhood were a mix of retirees obsessed with their gardens and cruise plans, and young families convinced theycould double their money if they upgraded their starter houses and sold them in a couple of years.
    He was too old to own a starter house, but after Whitney had walked out to “get on with her life,” the fixer-upper was all he could afford. It was his own fault. He had compounded the financial disaster of the divorce by quitting his job as a profiler back in D.C. and moving to Seattle to go out on his own.
    Everyone had warned him about the weather. Some said it wasn’t the rain that got to some people, it was the long stretches of gray. But he had been living in the city for over six months and he was fine with the climate.
    He had discovered that he liked being his own boss, too, even if he wasn’t making a lot of money yet.
    He probably should have rented when he arrived in Seattle, he thought. It would have made more sense financially. But he was an all-or-nothing kind of guy when it came to making commitments. The day he had walked off the plane he had made his decision. He would be staying in Seattle.
    He opened a can of tuna and made a couple of sandwiches. There was one large dill pickle left in the jar. He added it to the plate. A well-rounded meal required a vegetable of some kind.
    He took a beer out of the refrigerator, picked up the plate with the sandwiches and pickle on it and carried the meal to the kitchen table.
    A light shifted in one of the windows across the street. The curtains were pulled aside. A familiar face appeared.
    Anson Salinas raised a hand in greeting. Max returned the gesture. The curtain across the street dropped back into place.
    Anson was also new to Seattle, having moved there some four months back. Prior to that, he’d spent over thirty years in law enforcement, much of the time as the chief of police of a small town on the rugged coast of northern California.
    Max opened his laptop and contemplated the results of his latest search while he drank some beer and munched a sandwich. He was not entirely amazed to see that the two dead women and the three who had reportedbeing raped had a few things in common. The circles on the map had indicated a pattern. The trick was to figure it out.
    He studied the sparse details he had pulled up online for a few minutes. Then he looked at the time. It was not too late to call his new associate, he decided. He wondered if he should be worried about the fact that he was looking for an excuse—any excuse—to call her.
    Charlotte answered on the first ring.
    “What is it?” she said. “Did you find something?”
    Urgency shivered in her voice.
    “I just got off the phone with Daniel Flint,” Max said. “He’s okay with the three of us sharing information.”
    “Oh, good. I’m so glad. So now I’m a client, too?”
    “No, you’re a person with whom I will be sharing information,” he said patiently. “I thought I made that clear.”
    He wasn’t sure how to classify her, but he wanted it understood up front that she wasn’t a client. It was bad policy to sleep with a client and he had been having fantasies of sleeping with Charlotte ever since he had walked out of the elevator and found her waiting for him in the lobby.
    “I’m sort of a consultant, then?” she asked, dubious now.
    “No, because then I’d have to pay you.”
    It probably wasn’t smart to sleep with consultants, either, he thought.
    “I see.” She sounded almost amused. “Well, whatever you want to call it, we’re working together, right? Colleagues.”
    Probably not a good idea to think of her as a colleague, but he was running out of descriptive labels.
    “Colleague is good enough for now,” he said. “I called to ask you some questions.”
    “Yes, of course.”
    Max looked at the carry-on sitting beside the kitchen table. “You said your stepsister is on a retreat in the