Staying Dead - Laura Anne Gilman [21]
She had a mental image of Sergei running his brain through a shredder, and had to stifle a snort of laughter.
“What’s so funny?”
“Nothing.” She bit the inside of her lips, made a “go on” gesture. “Tell me about Margolin.”
He frowned at her, dark eyes narrowed in suspicion, but complied. “Mid-forties. Computer genius of sorts, chief technical officer for Frants Incorporated. Odd, for a Talent.”
“But not unheard of, especially if he’s passing. That low-level a Talent, probably enhances the tech stuff rather than shorting it out. Lucky bastard.” Wren didn’t carry high-tech toys because it was an exercise in frustration, not because she didn’t like them.
“According to this, he’s smart, savvy, and very very disgruntled. RUMINIT says he felt that he was passed over for promotion because of his religious beliefs.”
“What, he’s a Scientologist?”
It was Sergei’s turn to laugh. “No, agnostic. Rather militantly so. As in ‘I don’t know, and you don’t either.’”
Wren tried to raise only one eyebrow and failed, pretty sure that the resulting expression made her look like an inquisitive owl. “I can see where that could get up someone’s nose, yeah. But if he’s passing…Yeah.” She checked her notes. “Nope, no real training, far as anyone knows. No mentor ever claimed him.” That was how Talents worked, mostly; one-on-one apprenticeships. Went all the way back to when it wasn’t safe to work together—or tell anyone what you were, so you tied the knowledge up in secrecy and oaths. “He doesn’t have the firepower to do it himself, and I can’t see him having enough information without a mentor to track down and hire a mage to do something like this, either.” She narrowed her eyes as a sudden thought hit her. “Unless he’s from a Talented family that’s stayed low-profile, flying under the radar? Neezer said sometimes it ran in the bloodline like that. But not often, not so’s you could track it, anyway. So maybe he’s not private enemy number one after all.” She paused. “I wonder how he got on P.B.’s list.”
Sergei squinted at the list, trying to make out the handwriting. “Ursine?”
“Usury. Somebody’s got a light wallet, if he’s paying out the loan sharks, hey? Odd, you’d think he’d be making plenty of money. Kids’ tuition go up? He a gambler? The Cosa’s not pretty on people who welsh on debts.”
“No information on either. And they run some pretty heavy scans on people for exactly that. I’ll take it back and see what some determined digging can produce.”
Sometimes, Wren wondered about Sergei’s snitches. Not their ability—their origins. Mostly they were the usual: artists who heard every bit of gossip that rumbled through the collectibles world, high-rent agents who knew where the money was buried and the bodies bankrolled—that sort of thing. But every now and then she needed information you couldn’t get from a cocktail party, or through a discreet inquiry, and then his clear brown eyes would go dark and shadowed, and he’d refuse to say yea or nay…but the information always came through. And unlike his other sources, and her own, the information they gave was always straight-up. Always.
So she wondered, but never pried. For all that they pretty much lived in each other’s pockets during cases, weeks could go by otherwise when they only talked briefly on the phone. There was an awful lot about Sergei’s life she didn’t have clue one about.
Oh, Wren had known back when they first hooked up that her new partner was a man with secrets, not the least of which was how he’d even known about Talents and the Cosa in the first place. It wasn’t as though they took out ads in the local trades or anything. But he did know, and he never said how, and that had actually made her trust him more, not less. If she was going to let him in on her secrets, after all, she had to respect that he held others as securely, right? But oh, the desire sometimes to crack him open and see what secrets came rolling out…
In a purely mental, informational way. Of course. She’d seen the women he socialized with, had even met