"Obviously, if that happens, I'll get a new dress," she said patiently.
"Right," he said. Feeling like a complete idiot, he made a stab at getting the conversation back on track. "Financially, I'm free and clear, too. She got the house outside of D.C. and I cashed in my retirement account to come up with the settlement, but it was worth it. I wanted a clean break."
Charlotte nodded and took a bite of her roasted Brussels sprouts. "Sounds like we're both in the process of reinventing ourselves."
He almost choked on his beer. "That's putting a positive spin on things."
"You don't believe in the possibility of reinventing yourself?"
He reflected briefly. "People are what they are. Mostly they don't change. Not much, at any rate."
"That's a rather negative view of human nature."
He smiled slowly. "It has an upside. I make my living by identifying patterns of behavior and predicting people's actions. The fact that most folks don't change much over time is very good for my business."
"I take your point. And I do see plenty of real-world examples of your theory at Rainy Creek Gardens. People don't change much. They just become more concentrated versions of what they always were."
"Uh-huh." He ate a French fry. "Like I said, it's one of the cornerstones of my business model."
"You said you used to be a profiler," she said after a moment.
"We had a fancier name for the job-forensic behavioral analysis-but, yeah, I was a profiler. I worked for a consulting firm that took contracts with various police departments around the nation and the occasional government agency."
Charlotte put down her fork and studied him with a somber expression.
"How did you stand it?" she asked.
He had been about to eat another bite of his crab cakes. Slowly he lowered the fork.
"I don't think anyone has ever asked me that," he said. "When people find out what I used to do for a living, they ask me all sorts of questions. They want to know if real-world profiling works the same way it does on television. They ask me to tell them about the worst case I ever worked. They ask if I ever caught any famous killers. All kinds of questions. But not that one."
"Sorry. Didn't mean to get so personal. It's none of my business."
"It's okay," he said. "The answer is that there were a lot of times when I didn't think I would be able to go to one more murder scene. Times when I got sick to my stomach. Times when I woke up sweating from the nightmares. Times when I had to use booze or meds to get some sleep."
"But still you did the work."
He shrugged. "Yeah. What can I say? It paid well."
"That's not why you did it."
He raised his brows. "No?"
"No. I think you did the work because you were good at it and because someone has to do it. Sounds like it was a calling for you."
He considered that briefly. "Don't know about a calling. In the end I had to leave."
"You burned out on the profiling?"
It was a simple question-with a devastating answer. He should never have allowed the conversation to get this deep into the weeds of his personal problems.
He met her eyes. "There was a case. It ended badly. Afterward my issues-the night sweats and the insomnia-got worse. The company shrink concluded that I was no longer a useful member of the team. My colleagues thought I had become a full-blown paranoid. My wife announced she wanted a divorce. I was asked to resign. It was either that or be fired. So I resigned."
He braced himself for the fallout. He hadn't meant to tell her that much; he shouldn't have told her that much. But for some inexplicable reason, he wanted her to know the truth. He was not sure what to expect. Shock, maybe. Alarm, for sure. After all, she now knew that she was working with an investigator who had been forced out of his last job because he'd lost his nerve.
But Charlotte simply nodded in an understanding way, accepting the news in a manner that indicated she had sensed it before he told her-sensed it and wasn't concerned about it.
"So you moved out west to Seattle to find another way to use your talents," she said.
He wasn't sure where to go with that.
"Yes," he said.
"Why Seattle?"
Again he found himself surprised by her question.
"I was born here," he said.
"Did you grow up here?"
"No."
"But you feel a connection to Seattle because this is where you were born. I understand."
"My turn to ask the questions," he said. "How did you and Jocelyn come to be stepsisters?"
"My father died when I was a kid. Jocelyn lost her mother when she was in her teens. My mom and Jocelyn's dad got together when they each made the decision to go to their high school reunion . It turned out they had dated in their senior year, but they went off to different colleges and their lives took different directions."
"I take it that the old spark was reignited when they got together at the reunion ?"
"Yes. They were quite happy together, but we lost both of them two years ago."
"What happened?"
"Jocelyn's father was a pilot. Owned his own plane. He and Mom were on their way to a resort in Colorado. They ran into bad weather over the mountains. The plane went down. They were both killed."
"I'm sorry," Max said.
"Thank you."
"So now it's just you and Jocelyn?"
Charlotte nodded and drank some of her wine.
"I take it you and Jocelyn got along after your parents married?"
"Are you kidding? We hated each other at first."
"When did the two of you become close?" Max asked.
"I told myself I didn't want to be friends with Jocelyn, but the truth was, she was everything I wanted to be-what every teenage girl wants to be-savvy, gorgeous, confident, bold. She had a sense of style and she always had a boyfriend or three on the line. Plus she got good grades."
"An A-list girl."
"Definitely." Charlotte wrinkled her nose. "I was B list, believe me."
"All good reasons for you to resent her."
"Sure. But she had one other quality that changed everything. Jocelyn was kind to me."
"Kind?"
"Somewhere along the line she started to feel sorry for me. She kept an eye on me. For example, I got asked out by a senior. He was one of the A-list boys. Played on the football team. Dated the prettiest girls. Got accepted into a fine university. Needless to say, I was thrilled when he asked for a date. I'd never had a real date and now I'd been asked out by one of the most popular boys in school."
"Something tells me this story doesn't end well."
Charlotte raised her wineglass and looked at him across the top. "What's wrong with this picture, hm? You're right. It didn't end well. At least, that was what I thought at the time. But the truth was, Jocelyn rescued me. When I told her who had asked me out, she was furious. At first I thought it was because she was jealous. But she knew that the creep was involved in a nasty competition with some of the other boys on the team. They racked up points by having sex with as many girls as possible in their senior year. The guy who asked me out saw me as an easy target."
"You took Jocelyn's advice, I hope?"
"After a lot of heavy drama, yes, I took it. I was crushed, of course. But even then I knew that Jocelyn was a lot smarter than me when it came to the dangerous games played in high school. And she had one very important thing going for her when she made her pitch."
"What was that?"
"I'm risk averse, according to my therapist," Charlotte said. "I didn't know that back in those days, I just knew I wasn't terribly brave."
"The cautious type, huh?"
"Yep. Jocelyn, on the other hand, is an adrenaline junkie. I always leave the bungee jumping to her. At any rate she gave me enough details about what would happen on my big date with the football hero to scare the hell out of me. I canceled."
"So what went wrong with the fiancé? Why didn't Jocelyn save you from that mistake?"
"Good question. Brian Conroy seemed perfect. Jocelyn agreed. When we did the postmortem, we decided that we had both overlooked the obvious red flag."
"Which was?"
"Brian was just too good to be true."
Max picked up his beer glass. "So Jocelyn isn't always right when it comes to her judgments of other people?"
"Nope. But, then, nobody is."
"Yeah, the sociopaths are out there and they can fool anyone, at least for a while."
Charlotte frowned. "I'm very sure that Brian isn't a sociopath."
"I'll take your word for it."
"He's just . . . commitment-phobic. I don't think he realized it himself, until he got to the edge of the abyss and looked down."
"Speaking of ex-boyfriends, was your stepsister seeing anyone before she disappeared?"
Charlotte looked startled. "Wow. Slick way to change the subject."
He could feel himself turning red. Luckily the restaurant was heavily shadowed.
"Sorry," he said. "I do that sometimes when I'm working a case."
"Jump from one topic to another?"
"Yeah."
"Well, the answer is that Jocelyn wasn't seeing anyone in particular recently. There is no stalker lurking in the background, if that's what you're wondering, at least not that I know of."