Staying Dead - Laura Anne Gilman [33]
She briefly played with the idea of a Papal plot, but gave it up for lack of anything remotely resembling believable logic.
That left seven names she hadn’t been able to learn anything significant about, one way or the other, to clear them or move them up on the list. She chewed the eraser tip, then made a face at the taste and started tapping it on the desktop again.
“Seven magic-users with enough mojo and snitch-smarts to pull this off, who were still up and about enough to pull this off without leaving anything more than the reading I was able to scrape up or—more importantly—without blabbing it to anyone else. Damn it, this shouldn’t be so tough.”
Current made you chatty as well as rude, and people loved to brag. By now, there should be some chatter on the street.
“Arrrgh. This is total bullshit,” she said in disgust. Dropping the pencil, she stood up and stretched, palms flat and arms reaching for the ceiling. Abandoning the enclosed space and by-now-stale air of her office, she paced down the hallway, her bare feet adding to the furrows worn in the faded brown carpet.
“I’m never going to find out who pulled this off without more evidence. It would take me a year to run through everyone who was in town, much less winnowing out who might have a motive, or who was showing ready green from a job.”
Her mother was always after her to get a cat. Somehow, to her mother, talking to a cat was less harmful to one’s sanity than talking to oneself. Wren had always thought best out loud, for as long as she could remember, but it had really gotten out of control—in her mother’s opinion—when Neezer was training her. Even now sometimes with Sergei, going over a plan, she would pace and walk, while he sat there at his desk and was amused by her. Or, more often than not lately, they would pace back and forth past each other. Wasn’t that supposed to be a warning sign of co-dependency, when you start picking up each other’s habits like that?
“Screw this. What would Perry Mason say?”
She waited, pausing in her pacing, as though expecting Perry Mason to come to her aid.
“Okay, fine. What would Peter Wimsey say?” Her mother had hooked her on those books, the summer she had mono and had to spend almost three weeks in bed too tired to even think about doing anything more strenuous than turning a page.
She turned left rather than continuing down the hallway, finding herself filling the tea kettle and putting it on the burner. “Lord Peter would have charmed the guard into telling him the one thing he needed to learn from the scene, and Bunter would have found out the other essential clue, and Harriet would have put it all together in time for a little emotional angst with their tea. Christ, Wren, get a grip.” She pulled down a mug from the cabinet, snagging the tea canister as well. “Ignore the evidence, evidence lies. What’s the starting point in all this? What’s the source? Old man Frants. His building. His protection spell swiped.
“So, logic would say, look to who would stand to benefit. One of his competitors? No…one of his underlings. They’d have access to the building, they’d have something to gain from eroding the old man’s power base. So…who’s hungry? Who’s downtrodden?”
The kettle whistled, and she removed it from the heat. She filled a tea ball with pungent leaves from the canister, and dropped it into the mug, then poured the water over it, letting it steep as she stared at it in deep thought.
“You think I’m losing my touch?”
Sergei closed the door behind him, accepting the tea mug from her gratefully. “I most sincerely hope not.”
The whole tea-making thing was like a Sergei-alert. He started up the stairs, and she got an urge to make tea. It was deeply weird. But, like so much of the weirdness in her life, quite useful.
She perched herself comfortably on the counter, watching her partner/business agent sip his tea. He was dressed casually this evening, in dark gray slacks and a white button-down shirt under an expensive leather coat