Page 28 of Ruthless Cross

"Seriously?"

"Yes. He stole from rich people while he was a guest at their parties, or he'd come back to the house in the middle of the night after casing the place. He was a very good thief. Eventually, he expanded his skills, breaking into museums and galleries. After stealing the art, he'd sell it for big bucks. I'm sure he thought he was invincible, but the law caught up to him."

"Well, that's not a story I was expecting to hear. What happened to him? Did he go to jail?"

"He would have gone to jail, if he hadn't run. He disappeared in the dark of the night. He left my mother and me to fend for ourselves, which turned out to be more difficult than we imagined. The government froze all of my dad's assets. We lost the house. We lost everything."

"That's what you meant when you said your mom had gone through a dark time."

"She didn't fall apart, but she was struggling. We moved in with friends of hers in Pacific Palisades. I started a new high school in my senior year, but I was actually happy about that, because I was away from all the rumors, all the chatter about my dad. I met Olivia at the new school, and she brought some real light into my life. I was in a bad place, but she made it so much better. She took me home and introduced me to her family. Francine and Arthur were stable people, and Arthur had just become a judge. He knew what was right and what was wrong. There was no moral ambiguity with him. I felt like I'd found my compass."

"Maybe there was moral ambiguity, but you just didn't see it."

"I'm beginning to think you're right, but I need to know the truth, whatever it is."

"The truth can hurt, Flynn. I don't think it's all it's cracked up to be."

He could see why she would feel that way, but for him truth was all that mattered now. "Having grown up with someone who turned out to be a complete liar, who was not even close to who he appeared to be, I value honesty more than anything else."

She gazed at him, dark shadows in her eyes. "Do you still think I'm holding something back?"

"I think," he said, choosing his words carefully, "that you're afraid your mother had something to do with Arthur's death. You don't want to believe that, but you're just not one-hundred percent positive, so your go-to move is to defend her, to protect her."

"She doesn't have anyone else to do that for her but me."

He noticed she hadn't denied his point.

"Let's get back to you," Callie said. "What happened after Olivia died?"

"I went off the rails. I was drinking. I was surfing dangerous waves. I was almost daring the world to take me, too. But Judge Corbyn pulled me out of it. He physically dragged me out of a bar one night. He gave me a harsh lecture. It was a few months after Olivia died. He told me I was wasting my life and that was the last thing Olivia would want to see me doing. His words woke me up, because he was right. About that time, my mother had decided to move back to England to be near her parents, who were aging and in ill health. I went with her. I went to university there and when I graduated, I decided I would use my knowledge of the art world in a more positive way. I'd grown up in the gallery. I knew a lot about art and even more about the players, my dad's old buddies. But I knew I wouldn't get far using my dad's name, so I changed my name to mother's maiden name."

"So MacKenzie is not your dad's name?"

"No. His last name was Beringer—Sam Beringer. He was half French, half Russian. His father was a well-known artist in Moscow. He died of cancer before I was born. I'm sure he would have hated the direction my father took." He cleared his throat and took a sip of his wine, then continued. "I took a job in a gallery in London and I decided to look for my father. I wanted to make him pay for what he'd done. I made a lot of trips around Europe, hoping to find him. Along the way, I stumbled upon a counterfeit art network. It wasn't tied to my dad, but I wound up going to the FBI, to the person who had actually arrested my father. I told him I wanted to even out the scales. He used me to make a case, and after that, he suggested I come and work for the bureau."

"It's so strange that you would work for the people who nailed your dad. But I guess there's a kind of dark poetic justice to that. You're more complicated than you appear, aren't you?"

"Maybe, but then most people are."

"That's true. Do you mostly work on art crimes then?"

"I did for the first two and a half years after I went through Quantico. I managed to bring down a terror network that was using art to fund their terrorism efforts. It was a big coup for the bureau. At that point, I was done with art and thought I might be done with the bureau. I couldn't spend the rest of my life chasing my father's ghost."

"That makes sense."

"But the higher-ups wanted to keep me on board, so they offered me my own task force to work on whatever needs to be done."

"You run a task force? That sounds impressive. You're not that old, are you?"

"No, but I'm that good," he said with a cocky smile. "And I'm better when I can move outside the layers of bureaucracy. I was able to prove that to my bosses and they rewarded me."

"But now you're investigating a murder that could be tied to the art world. You're back where you started."

"And it's my knowledge of that world that will hopefully help me solve the crime."

"Not if you keep looking at me and my mother as suspects," Callie said somewhat tartly, giving him a pointed look.

"I look at everyone as a suspect. But just so you know, you're off the list. I don't think you killed Arthur or that you know who did."

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