What had made him say that? Caroline had no need to know of his long-ago visit to the Chicago museum where Dürer’s work set his adolescent imagination on fire.

“How so?” she asked.

He backed away from the truth and used a safer answer. “His engravings use similar techniques to those for printing currency. I went to art school and studied the process.”

“You can do art like this?” she asked, gaping at the exquisite woodcut before them.

To his mortification, a blush started to heat his cheeks. “No,” he rushed to say. “Albrecht Dürer is the holy grail of engravers. I’m only an amateur.”

“But it was your engraving skills that got you hired to sniff out counterfeit?”

He nodded. “Engraving is the foundation for creating the most lucrative counterfeits. Currency is the most popular, but stock certificates, land deeds, and even postage stamps can all be faked. It’s actually not that hard for me to spot anomalies in engravings.”

The Kestrel Gang he had sought for so long had mastered dozens of types of engraved forgeries, and his hand instinctively trailed to the kestrel clip holding his tie in place. Caroline noticed.

“Any luck tracking them down?” she asked.

He shook his head. “I’ll find them someday. It’s only a matter of time. What’s frustrating is that forgers disappear quickly, but their work slips into circulation and can go years without anyone noticing. In fact, there’s one in this very building. Do you want me to show you?”

Her eyes widened. “Absolutely!”

He’d spotted the Vermeer painting two years ago and was almost certain it was a fake. His footsteps echoed on the marble staircase as he headed down to the room of seventeenth-century European masters. He strode past the old-world paintings of grim-faced Dutch merchants and epic battle scenes to stand before the barefoot peasant girl with a rabbit on her lap. She sat on an overturned barrel in a rustic barnyard so perfectly rendered that he could almost smell the hay and dust.

The painting was enchanting, with the girl’s fingers splayed to clutch the rabbit poised to jump from her lap. An open window in the farmhouse behind the girl showed cooling loaves of bread on the windowsill.

“It’s charming,” Caroline said.

“Yes.”

“I love how it looks like the girl is holding her breath, as though she knows that rabbit is about to make a leap for freedom.”

He smiled, for that was exactly the expression on the girl’s face. “Yes. Sadly, I think it’s a forgery.”

“How can you tell?”