Scarlet investigates Max Smithson and brings in her father

Scarlet O’Bannon’s investigation into Max Smithson turns suspicion inside the Federal Bureau of Investigation into a practical alliance with her father, Derrick O’Bannon. The inquiry offers no proof that Derrick is corrupt, nor does it settle every question surrounding Smithson. Its decisive turn is personal as well as procedural: Scarlet chooses to risk her father’s involvement, even while the unresolved loss of Tess makes trust between them painful and uncertain.

The trail to Max Smithson

In the six days before meeting her father, Scarlet speaks with three agents and spends the remainder of her time researching agents she considers suspect. Max Smithson becomes the central focus. At first she sees him as a familiar kind of older professional: smiling, paternal, and willing to make a pass when circumstances allow. The details she uncovers make that reassuring manner harder to accept. Smithson owns a yacht, an apartment, and a house in California despite having no offices there; his brother, by contrast, works low in the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Scarlet also recalls that Cormac MacKay’s men were sent to California, a detail that gives Smithson’s travel and property a possible connection to the mob struggle.

Her checks deepen the suspicion without resolving it. Using access to investigative resources, she finds that Smithson spent all his holiday time in California over the past year. His history does show a source of wealth—a string of laundromats around town—but she finds no purchase history for them. The mismatch between his apparent resources, his California properties, and the missing record of how he acquired the businesses suggests concealed financing. Scarlet wonders whether corruption in New York City could support Smithson’s lifestyle, but she treats that as a possibility rather than an established fact. The trail is suggestive, not conclusive.

A suspicion that reaches the family

The inquiry grows from Cormac’s own explanation of Mickey MacFarland’s rise. Cormac argues that Mickey is not clever enough to have moved against his father and seized power without help. In his account, the transfer of some of his men to California and Mickey’s move against his father point to support from within the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Scarlet resists treating that claim as proven. She insists that procedure and rules matter, even as she recognizes that the conflict touches her work and Cormac’s world at once.

That tension follows her into the meeting with Derrick. Scarlet meets him over coffee at a small shop, carrying both her research and the weight of Tess’s death. The sight of her father brings back grief and guilt; she finds it difficult to look at him as she would another suspect. She nevertheless names Smithson and two agents she believes may be working with him: Elijah Sullivan and Gertrude Fitzgerald. Her father calls the allegations serious and asks what evidence she has. His measured response does not establish his innocence, but neither does Scarlet possess evidence that he is involved. Her suspicion of him remains a fear she has to test, not a conclusion she can claim.

Bringing Derrick into the investigation

Scarlet directly asks whether her father is working with Smithson. Derrick denies it and says he would never betray the Federal Bureau of Investigation. His answer lands uneasily because his certainty recalls the judgmental tone Scarlet associates with him, including his earlier question about whether she could have reached the shore sooner. Her professional instincts tell her to assess him as a suspect; her daughter’s history with him makes that assessment difficult. She also recognizes a parallel between his language of loyalty and her own complicated position beside Cormac, a mobster with whom she has become intimately involved.

Rather than ending the meeting with the accusation, Scarlet proposes a next step: she will take Derrick to meet the informants she has been working with. She describes Cormac and Moira as affiliates of the Irish mob who may help them capture Mickey. Calling them informants makes her feel guilty, as though every choice betrays someone, but she makes the offer anyway. Derrick accepts the plan as sound. The move changes the investigation from private suspicion into a proposed joint operation, linking an FBI agent and his daughter’s mob-connected sources against Mickey’s takeover.

Grief, risk, and the next move

The recruitment does not erase the family wound at the heart of the scene. As Derrick rises to leave, Scarlet tells him she tried to save Tess. He pauses, his eyes filling, then asks whether they should get going. The exchange leaves the grief unresolved, but it makes clear that the investigation is not merely a professional puzzle for Scarlet: the people she is evaluating and enlisting are bound to her by family, memory, and responsibility.

The later search for Scarlet and Moira shows Derrick acting alongside Cormac and the others rather than remaining outside the operation. In Flint’s car, Flint studies a photograph’s reflected towers and identifies the ballroom as a likely location. Derrick is present for that deduction and questions why mobsters would have a ballroom. This later moment does not prove the truth of Scarlet’s suspicions about Smithson, but it shows the practical consequence of her earlier decision to bring her father in: he is now part of the group trying to find the women and confront the danger surrounding Mickey. The investigation’s central tension persists—formal procedure is necessary, yet the corruption being suspected may make ordinary reliance on the Federal Bureau of Investigation unsafe.