Fire and Obsidian

by Andrew Grey

  “But his hands ache now in the winter, and he’s only happy when it’s hot. So he says that after he’s done this time, he and I will move to someplace warmer.” She seemed happy, and James replayed the conversation quickly in his head to make sure it sounded completely innocent. Of course it did. But as soon as James glanced at Mattias, he knew the two of them weren’t fooling him.

  “That sounds like a great plan, Mom. I need to get back to work, but I’ll call you later, I promise.” James hung up, and Mattias stared at him, hard, his arms crossed over his chest.

  “Well, that was the most strained and incredibly coded conversation.” Mattias shifted his gaze slightly. “What is it your father does?”

  James groaned and ran his hands down over his face. He swallowed hard as they approached the station, and sped up, deciding that work and being busy were his only chances at avoiding the questions he didn’t want to answer.

  He called Pierre, telling him they were nearly back, then parked the car, got out, and climbed the steps to the station, feeling Mattias’s steely gaze behind him. But a conversation about his mother and father was the last thing he wanted to have at the moment.

  Chapter 5

  MATTIAS CHECKED with his hotel, but they weren’t answering, and Clay told him that the power was still being restored. Apparently there were issues beyond the line being cut. Power was expected to return later today, but Mattias still didn’t have a hotel. James was as jumpy as a long-tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs, and had been for most of the day. The others wondered why out loud, and Mattias stayed out of it and as far away from him as he could.

  James claimed he had a ton of paperwork to finish, but Mattias understood classic avoidance when he saw it. He, Clay, and Pierre spent much of the late afternoon throwing around ideas on patterns and trying to make sense of the data they had, but didn’t get very far. At the end of their shifts, Clay and Pierre headed home, and Mattias waited for James, trying not to think about spending the night on Old Stinky in the changing room, but figuring something like that was definitely in the cards with the way James had been acting.

  “Are you ready to go?” James asked. “We got a report of another burglary. This one is just outside Carlisle. I called Clay and Pierre, and they’re already en route.” He was halfway out the door before finishing his thought. Mattias packed up his computer, slid it into his bag, and followed at a half jog to catch up.

  The drive seemed like minutes, and then Mattias was out of the car, staying away from the heart of the action because the house was a crime scene and he didn’t need to make James any more uptight.

  “I came home from work and the back door was partially open,” a woman in her early thirties said as she stood on her front lawn. Mattias could imagine what they took: nothing bulky or big, but everything of compact value. And he was right, as she went on to describe the ordeal, her hands shaking.

  James led her back into the house, and Mattias followed behind, his hands in his pockets, looking through the immaculate home as he went. They went to the living room and had her sit on the sofa. Mattias stood nearby, wanting to listen but also needing to stay out of the way.

  “I’m sorry for your loss. I know this is hard, but can you tell me anything else? Let’s start with what’s missing.”

  She pulled a tissue out of the container on the side table. “My mother’s and grandmother’s rings. They weren’t valuable, but it’s all I have of theirs.” She pressed the Kleenex to her eyes. “My father had a pinkie ring. He was a first responder after 9-11. He drove to the city and worked for months on the pile that was left. He died a year later of an infection that ate him alive. That ring was so precious to me.” She buried her face in the tissue, and James let her sob.

  “Is anyone else here with you?” Mattias asked.

  She shook her head, and Mattias came around and sat next to her. She held his hand as he sat still. “Is this okay? I mean, police officers….” Her makeup ran down her cheeks, and Mattias grabbed another tissue from a nearby box.

  “I’m not a police officer, and you can hold my hand all you want.” Mattias couldn’t turn away from someone who was hurting this much. “Just take your time and tell the detective what you can, when you can.” He took a deep breath, met James’s gaze, and let her compose herself.

  “I’m sorry,” she said after a minute, and dabbed her face. “I’m trying to think of all that’s gone, but I’m finding it hard.”

  “Did you have any insurance records or pictures?” Mattias asked.

  She swallowed and nodded. “I have them on a drive in the lockbox in the basement. At least I think I do, unless they took that too.” She stood, and Mattias let James take her downstairs. They returned with a box that seemed intact, and she sat down on the sofa again. “John, my ex-husband, always picked on me because I had one of these. He thought I was being paranoid, but it’s where I keep the important papers and things like that.” She unlocked it and pulled out a zip drive. “They’re pictures I took on the table. There’s nothing fancy, but it should have images of everything.” She seemed to have regained some composure.

  “Let me get my computer, and we can go through them all and you can tell us what’s missing.” Mattias went back to the car, got his bag, and brought it in, then unloaded and booted up his computer before putting in the drive. There were five hundred images on the drive. Apparently she wasn’t kidding when she said there were pictures of everything. And they were in no particular order, so they went through all of them, with her shaking her head most of the time and then stopping them at an item that was gone.

  It took a while, but the expected pattern emerged. Twenty or so items were taken, jewelry, silver, a few small bronze pieces that were probably the most valuable of everything. James took down the information, and Mattias copied the drive to his computer, then removed it and handed the original back to her.

  Mattias wanted out. The walls were closing in, and he needed a few minutes to himself. Not that he figured he was going to get it, but her raw emotion had gotten to him in a big way, and Mattias needed a chance to process it. “Is there anything else for now?”

  James shook his head. “We’ve worked the scene and have everything I think we can get. The guys are running down possible witnesses, and you look dead on your feet.” He led the way to the car and unlocked the doors.

  Mattias got in and leaned back in the seat, closing his eyes. He was too tired to argue, and his mind swam with fatigue. He expected James to take him back to the station, but they ended up at James’s house. “Hopefully the power will be on later tonight and I can go back to my hotel and get out of your hair.”

  James humphed but didn’t actually say anything.

  Mattias followed him inside and collapsed into one of the living room chairs. “How can you do this every day? You see people hurt one another and have to talk to people like her all the time. Life threw her a shit sandwich, and you have to try to help make it right again.”

  “Very interesting metaphor,” James quipped as he sat down as well and put his feet up. “I’ll get some dinner together soon. Right now, I don’t think I can eat after that.” He leaned forward, catching Mattias’s gaze.

  “No way.”

  “Yeah. I have sandwich stuff for dinner, but I think you just killed that idea.” James smiled. Mattias liked it when he did that. He got the idea that smiling and generally being happy wasn’t something James did a lot of.

  “Why don’t I make dinner?” Mattias offered. “I’m a pretty good cook, and if you show me what you have, I can put something together.”

  James rolled his eyes. “You sure about that? There isn’t a lot in the house. I eat out a lot and spend a great deal of time alone.” He pushed himself up as well. “Cooking for one is hell.”

  “Tell me about it,” Mattias added. “I like cooking, but most of the time I either make too much and end up eating the same damned thing for a week, or I get one of those meals-for-one things in the stor
e and heat it up.” He went into the kitchen, opened cupboards, and pulled out some things. “There’s pasta. That’s always a good starting point.” He continued looking before opening the freezer and then the refrigerator. “You weren’t kidding.” Mattias found some cheese, and there was milk. He dug in the freezer and pulled out a bag of green stuff.

  “Mom made that for me. It’s her basil mixture.”

  Mattias grinned. “Pesto. Oh, there is a God.” He got to work and soon had water on to boil for the pasta, mixed up a little pesto cream sauce, and found the things for a salad. “It looks like you had a feast in there that you didn’t know about.” He pulled out a chair for James. “While I do this, you can tell me about that stuff with your mom.”

  “I was hoping you’d let that go.” James sounded almost as thrilled to talk about that as he would to be getting a root canal. “I don’t suppose that’s possible.” The chair scraped on the floor while Mattias cut up a tomato.

  “You don’t have to.” Mattias figured giving him an out was the nicer thing to do.

  “I never talk about my family with anyone… ever.” James leaned on the table, and Mattias started slicing a cucumber that had seen better days but still had good parts. “Mom and Dad….” James sighed. “My father is a jewel thief. It’s what he’s done for as long as I can remember. He cases homes and spends months planning his heists.” He patted the table with his hand.

  “Okay….”

  “I never saw my dad do anything, and he’s never put me or my mom in a compromising position. His work was his work, and he didn’t bring it home. I found out by chance once when I came across a diamond the size of your eye in his car. It was an accident, and I never went near anything he drove or carried again.”

  Mattias put the salad together and set the bowl on the table. “So you lived the life too?”

  “Yeah. Dad got caught when I was fourteen, and went to prison for a year. That was the hardest time of my life. I was in school, and all the other kids knew where my dad was. I saw those looks and endured their taunts until Dad got out, and we moved as soon as his probation was over. It was a new school, and Dad said we had a chance at a new life. But he was back at it soon enough and has been ever since.” James shook his head. “I vowed to have nothing to do with that and wanted to be a cop so I could help the kind of people my dad hurt.”

  Mattias nodded. “I understand. I really do.” He patted James on the shoulder. “Do you see them often?”

  “No. They live in West Virginia, and that conversation with my mom was telling me that Dad is in Florida pulling some job. I don’t want to know what it is, but it kills me. It’s the eternal moral dilemma. Part of me says to turn him in and let the chips fall where they may. But he’s my dad, so I turn a blind eye. Mom knows, and she pretty much does the same. It’s how they’ve lived for decades. Spending your life in denial and self-justification isn’t the way I want to live. I need my life to be clean, and I need to feel good about what I’m doing.”

  Shit, that was quite a revelation. “I really do understand that.” Mattias put the pasta in the water to cook, stirred it, and then sat down next to James. “I suppose it’s my own confession time.”

  James stood and got a bottle of wine out of one of the lower cupboards. “If we’re going to share stories like these, then I think we could both use a little fortification.” He poured two glasses, and Mattias finished making dinner before rejoining James at the table with a dish of pasta and a story.

  “I had a shitty childhood. Well, not all of it, just most of it. My parents are out there somewhere, I like to think. But I never knew my dad, and my mom… she didn’t want me. When I was about five, she left me with my grandma and grandpa. Those were the happy years. They took me places, and I went to school. All the stuff normal kids did.” Mattias shook his head and dished up some of the rigatoni and salad. “I suppose that was the really good part. I lived with them for four years until they died in a car accident.” Mattias swallowed around the lump in his throat and coughed on the bite he’d taken. “Look, this is a crappy story, and you don’t need to hear this stuff.”

  James took a large drink of his wine and then refilled his glass, then added some more to Mattias’s afterward. “There’s no law that says you have to tell me anything.” James’s eyes twinkled. “You have the right to remain silent.”

  Mattias groaned at the bad joke but smiled anyway. “Cute.”

  “I thought so.” James wagged his eyebrows.

  Mattias found himself laughing. He took another bite, this one going down without incident. “Anyway.” He might as well get this over with. “They died when I was nine, and I ended up in the foster care system, shuffled from place to place, trying to make myself invisible. And that I was good at. I stayed places for longer because I never made trouble. But at sixteen, one of the foster fathers decided I was pretty… and I was out of there. From then on, I took care of myself, and I learned how to steal. That was how I survived. I took what I needed, and then more and more as I figured things out. I broke into my first house when I was seventeen, and stole stuff I could pawn at the drop of a hat. I survived and got a fleabag apartment that I paid cash for by the week. I continued working, cased houses.” He set his fork down. “I spent my money on decent clothes, good haircuts, and plenty of soap and water to stay clean. Nobody gave me a second thought when I cased their houses because I looked like I belonged there.”

  “So you didn’t have a mentor like in the movies?” James asked.

  “The movies are just fantasy. You know that life is a lot grittier than that, and more basic. I was feeding and housing myself. I had some money put away, and I stayed under the radar. I almost got caught a few times, but I needed to live, so I continued stealing… for nearly ten years.” Mattias paused and took a drink of the wine. It bit his throat as it went down, but he needed that.

  “What changed?” James asked. “People don’t make huge life shifts without something to pull them out of themselves. I’d have thought that my dad being in jail would do it for him, but it only made him more determined to continue the life he’d had before.”

  Mattias took a few bites, trying to get his thoughts together. “I came face-to-face with what I was doing. Like today with that lady.” He paused and tried to talk, but the words wouldn’t come right away. “The place I lived was pretty basic, and the neighborhood wasn’t very good. Mrs. Wellerman lived on the first floor. She had only Social Security and mostly stayed inside her apartment. One morning I heard her crying. Someone had broken in, while she was there, and taken what little she had.” Mattias set down his fork and lowered his gaze. “Her husband had been gone ten years, and she had almost nothing left. Just her wedding ring, which the thief stole right off her finger. They also took her husband’s ring and a few other things. All she had left of a forty-year marriage was gone… poof. Just the fuck like that.” Mattias felt the anger and shame from that day well inside him again. “She was helpless, and I wanted to do something.” He sighed. “I contacted the people I dealt with, and sure enough, the asshole had sold them for a few dollars. I found them in the shop, bought them back, and broke into her apartment while she was sleeping and put them on her kitchen table. That was the last crime I committed. I couldn’t do it after that.” He blew air out of his mouth. “I tried more than once, but every time, I saw Mrs. Wellerman and how torn up she was over those little items that I bought back for a few hundred dollars. To the thief, to me, they had just been things to turn into cash. But to her it was a hold on the past—a better, happier time—and I was taking that away from people.” He drained the last of his wine and was grateful when James poured some more.

  “A thief with a conscience,” James said without heat or sarcasm, which was good, because Mattias was pretty sure he wasn’t going to be able to take it right now.

  “No. I think I grew a heart, like the Grinch.” He ate a few more bites and sat back, his appetite gone. “It took me some time to start the business I
have now, but it’s legitimate, and I haven’t taken a thing from anyone, except the fees that I earn, in eight years. I can’t replace the things I stole, because they’re gone, but I can try to make up for what I did by stopping others.” He blinked and leaned over the table. “That’s why we’re going to find, catch, and nail these bastards to the wall.”

  James raised his glass, and Mattias did the same, lightly clinking them together. “To the past and putting it behind us.”

  “Amen.” Mattias emptied the glass down his throat. He needed something to drink and thought of asking for something stronger than wine, but that wasn’t a good idea. He knew that when he thought he needed a drink, it was probably best to refrain. “I never talk about that. It’s over and in the past.” He sighed and brought over his bowl of salad to eat because he needed something to cover his discomfort. “I try to forget it, if I’m honest.”

  “But it doesn’t work,” James said, and Mattias nodded. “You can’t forget part of who you are. You can alter the person you want to be, but part of who you are…?” He tilted his eyebrows. “I’ve spent a lot of my teen years and adulthood trying to get away from what my father is. I can’t change him.”

  “Yeah, but you know what your dad does, yet you don’t turn him in.” Mattias leaned forward. “That has to ring a lot of moral bells. You’re a police officer.”

  James nodded. “Yes, and you’re a thief. You told a room full of police officers that. It’s part of who you are.” He got up, went into the dining room, and returned with a box. He set it on the table and opened it. “This was a gift from my mom and dad when I bought the house.”

  Mattias lifted out one of the forks and turned it over. “Beautiful, Gorham silver, sterling, over a hundred years old. High quality and desirable even today when the market for silver flatware is running low.” He set the fork back.