Con Man: Complete Series Box Set: A Bad Boy Romance by M. S. Parker Page B

if anyone discovered that I was hiding what I knew.
    By the time Friday rolled around, I was a tense, strung out mess. I spent every waking hour I wasn’t at the office trying to search for some sort of paper trail to prove that the guy in the video wasn't my childhood friend. That this grifter wasn't the same kid who'd once given his entire life savings – a grand total of twenty-three dollars and forty-seven cents – to Mrs. Windicott after her husband was killed overseas.
    The problem was, the last time Broderick Murray had surfaced anywhere had been eight years ago when he'd gotten busted on a petty larceny charge. He'd only had a couple juvenile offenses prior to that, and never anything more violent than a fist fight with another foster kid, so he'd gotten away with probation. He'd checked in with the probation officer twice, then vanished.
    After that, there was no record of Broderick Murray at all.
    His mugshot when he was nineteen filled in the blanks between the kid I'd known and the man I'd seen in the security video. While a good defense attorney would probably be able to argue away the resemblance, for me, it was damning.
    I tried running his prints against the system to see if any aliases popped up, but there weren't any. I even put in a call to Interpol to see if he'd started his art theft over there, but I'd gotten their email this morning to say that there wasn't anything on their end.
    How had a runaway become a con good enough to fool a museum curator for weeks, then make off with three paintings, all without leaving a trace of himself? Getting his reflection in the door had been sheer dumb luck borne out of obsessiveness.
    No matter how hard I tried, or where I looked, I couldn't put the pieces together.
    Granted, I was sure the three hours of sleep I'd gotten each night since the theft occurred weren't enough to properly fuel my brain, but I didn’t have much of a choice if I wanted to be covert about my one-woman investigation force. I couldn't risk anyone seeing the databases I was searching or the files I was looking through. If one person saw his name, the questions would begin, and they were questions I didn't want to answer.
    I sighed as I walked into the office, desperate for it to finally be the weekend. Just as I slipped through the front door and snuck past my ever-flirtatious boss, I decided that I was only going to give myself until Monday to find some sort of lead on Broderick before I would give up and submit all my evidence to Benita.
    And tonight...I was taking tonight off.
    I needed to clear my head, or I would end up making an even bigger mess of things than I already had. I always did better once I had a deadline anyway.
    “Hey rookie,” Alverez greeted me. “You coming down with something? Every day you come in here looking worse and worse.”
    I replied with my usual snide tone, “Aren’t you a confidence booster.”
    “Come on, you know I don’t mean anything by it.” Benita sat on my desk as I plopped down in my seat, pretty much the antithesis of grace. “What, did that one overnighter throw off your whole sleep schedule?”
    Sure, that was a good enough excuse. “I haven't pulled one of those since college. I'll get used to it again.”
    “I know you will.” Alverez smiled broadly. “If there’s one thing I’ve learned in the short time we’ve been together, it’s that once you put your mind to something, you stubbornly beat it with a stick until whatever it was is your bitch.”
    That surprised me into a laugh. “Well, that’s one way to put it.”
    “Anytime.” She hopped off my desk and returned to her own. “By the way, we’re going back to the museum after lunch. They think they might have been able to recover some more relevant security footage.”
    My heart thudded painfully against my ribcage. “Did they say what? Did they get his face?”
    “Ha, I wish. No, but they might have been able to get a shot of his back as he cased the place. Could