Thieves & Kings

Rich, well dressed, a decent detective, a legendary luddite. It was that last part that should’ve made breaking into William Carnegie’s apartment easy. The man’s curses rolled out of his office in a slow crescendo most afternoons, frustration written on the Hollywood leading man face as he stalked out to the break room for coffee he’d undoubtedly bought. Carnegie hid his lights under a bushel, but he wore those small faults like armour. Luckily for him he hadn’t needed to be a modern day whizz kid to foil crime in New York, taking himself from a lowly patrol office to detective in half the time it took most others. He hadn’t needed it to save his ex-wife’s life either.

Michael had pulled together his picture of the detective over weeks of observation. Picking through the detective’s files on a system that couldn’t keep a five year old out of it if they happened to be on one of the networked machines – a six year old if they were outside of it. Yawning his way through dozens of articles that littered the New York gossip magazines. Honestly, it seemed no wonder that his marriage had failed. The spotlight had seemed to be on Carnegie and the woman who had briefly been his wife almost as often as it had been on Carnegie’s father. The great and dubious Oz – Dalton Carnegie. He was the son of a con man and grifter, a man who seemed to have bought his way into his NYPD throne in a way that Orlov would’ve appreciated. Maybe Dalton had used a little magical influence to get himself there. He was almost certain that Carnegie had to rescue his wife.

His nose wrinkled as he worked his way along the short hallway to Carnegie’s door. No scent of magic in the air, but there was a herbal hint to the air that could either have been the product of stored magical supplies or Carnegie playing at being Gordon Ramsey in his spare time. Carnegie thought he hid that part of himself well too, but he’d seen the guy sharing his lunch with Buckley’s girlfriend down at the station – he might’ve believed it was something more than comparing cannelloni recipes, if he hadn’t obviously still been pining over Agent Washington.

Whatever connection he’d used to get the fancy locks in had done a decent job. The device was rolling through possible combinations a thousand times faster than he could’ve done manually, but his was no 1234 passcode for dummies. The first digit locked in after a long minute. Sweat pricked at the back of his neck. Two digits, still six to go by the looks of things. By the time the eighth locked in, he was certain that there had to be something hidden here. You didn’t go to all that trouble for an expensive wine collection.

The door swung in silently, revealing a dim, quiet apartment beyond. Michael crept through the gap, his fingers hovering on the edge of the door while he strained his senses to make a hundred percent sure. He was just turning back to close it when it was ripped out of his hands. ”Is it just a game?” Michael muttered, backing up a step, wary enough now that his eyes were glittering that electric blue. Carnegie didn’t seem the sort, but this felt like he’d willingly just climbed into a trap.

Son of a bitch!

Snapping around, Michael stared towards the kitchen and the speaker of the small radio tucked on the countertop opposite the door. The voice had seemed to emerge from everywhere, but that was the one spot he could see for now. That hadn’t been Carnegie’s voice. It was too high, too whiny. No security company would bother with the interrogation. They’d have just sent the cops, keeping him (or trying to) in the apartment until the cops got there. ”Checkity-check myself…” Michael echoed before he laughed. Two could play at poking around in Carnegie’s security system.

He opened three doors around him rapidly before he found what passed for an office. Carnegie had a fancy mahogany slab of a desk, of course. A banker’s chair pulled up close to it. A laptop sat on the blotter, a little more state of the art than the pieces of crap they had at the station. Michael opened it, immediately tapping at the keyboard. ”What did he do, hire himself a little hacker to keep the place safe? Let me guess, he let you skate on some charge so you could do all his dirty work for him?” Squinting at the screen, Michael tried the password he’d seen Carnegie typing into his work computer. Most people weren’t all that smart, they used the same password everywhere despite every warning not to. ”How often do you have to save him from himself, huh?” Grandpa hadn’t been savvy enough to make this hard. Michael huffed out a breath as he started to race through the files in search of something that would tie Carnegie to the magical community.

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He’d felt rusty as he’d settled back behind a desk at the station. Years spent away from official channels had him chafing at the metaphorical shackles you had to wear when everything you did had to be legal. While he’d been away he’d felt the loss of it like another part of him had been carved away – although there’d been precious little left of him after Abi and Sara had been killed. It had been easier to do what he had to for Orlov when there was nothing of who had been left. With Abi’s return he’d found himself entirely shedding that other side of him, like it had just been a costume he’d slipped on for a while.

With the sound of the voice emerging around him it was like the world had flipped again. The thief was the one who was off his game now, the sudden fear that all that he’d rebuilt here with his daughter was about to go up in smoke drifting into his mind. Some part of him questioned why Detective Carnegie would have this level of security on his place, but Michael knew that why should’ve been the least of his questions right now.

How was he gonna get out? How was he gonna hide his tracks? How was he gonna get what he came for before he did any of those things?

Once upon a time he’d been a data whiz, his brain working through rafts of data at high speed, making the leaps between seemingly unconnected bits of information others couldn’t. It had put him in the shadow’s path, a bug to be crushed beneath a powerful boot, but he hadn’t believed that Carnegie could possibly be on that level. Michael shook his head as that voice hissed out. No, Carnegie wouldn’t send men to carve his family to pieces, he’d just let a kid bug his intruders to death.

”I’ll pass, thanks,” Michael muttered dryly. ”I wouldn’t want you scrubbing blood out of the fancy rugs.” And the place was fancy. Like something of an Architectural Digest magazine. Carnegie definitely spent as much money on the apartment as he did his appearance. The rooms weren’t nouveau riche levels of tacky, that wasn’t Carnegie’s style, but every bit of furniture had probably come from an antique store, the art on the walls was definitely not the poker playing dogs sort. Orlov probably would’ve had him stripping the place bare of the more expensive shit, but he wasn’t here for his former boss, this was a fact finding mission of his own, which meant that the laptop was his focus.

The clock in his head ticked off the seconds until the sirens would likely pierce the air. By now Carnegie had probably been informed by the brat that someone was in his place. Michael snorted as he got into the computer. Speaker-boy really needed to teach Carnegie a thing or two about security. ”What the fuck…” Michael hissed as the folder he’d opened shut. A heartbeat later a face appeared on the screen – murky and amorphous, something straight out of one of those cheesy teen horror movies. Someone in your laptop … ooh scary. Not.

Immediately Michael was tapping at the keyboard again, trying to clear the intrusion from the computer. His eyes narrowed, dark brows furrowing as every move failed. ”Who says you’re gonna get any choice in the matter? I’m here, you’re not, which means…” He could disconnect Carnegie’s computer from the internet and cut off whatever route this asshole had into Carnegie’s device.

Mike. Fuck. He sucked in a deep breath, staring at where the eyes should’ve been on that disembodied face on that screen. Was he rattled? Maybe, but he wasn’t scared of some pissant little jerk who knew enough about computers to take remote control of the laptop. ”It’s Michael.” Or Agent Shepard if you wanted to dig far enough and this guy had. ”You think the bosses would wanna know what Carnegie’s up to as well? I’d say murder trumps breaking and entering, don’t you?” He didn’t have evidence that Carnegie had killed the men in that warehouse, or if he had that he’d done so unlawfully, but he was willing to see if that swing happened to hit.

Laughter rolled out of him tightly as the guy went from ‘hey criminal, I’m gonna snitch on you’ to ‘hey, maybe you should get a cool name’. ”Anybody ever tell you comic books aren’t real?” he sneered. ”Lemme guess, you gave yourself a nickname, some shitty secret identity you can hide behind on the internet so people don't release you’re still living in your mom’s basement. What is it? The Snitch? Phiber Optik? Doesn’t seem to be like either you or Carnegie are geniuses. If you did I wouldn’t have got in here in the first place.”

Pushing back from the computer, Michael started to scout around the room for Carnegie’s modem. Of course it was tiny and sleek, sitting on a side table like it was a piece of art, not a piece of plastic Carnegie wouldn’t have understood the first thing about. Not bothering to just switch it off, Michael ripped the cable straight out of the wall, then turned back. Maybe some of Carnegie’s shit was in cloud storage, but he doubted the guy would risk it if he really was some sort of a criminal mastermind in the sheep’s clothing of a walking ad for GQ.

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