Staying Dead - Laura Anne Gilman [50]
Plus, a real mental-case collector—the obsessive, aggressive, doesn’t mind breaking the law to own something type—kept his spoils well-guarded. In fact, he didn’t care if anyone else knew he owned something or not. What’s important was that he knew that he owned something that no one else could have, either because it was one-of-a-kind, or impossible to obtain, or some variation on that theme. He wouldn’t need to advertise, to show off, or to gloat. So there would be fewer weak chinks in his armor for Wren to wiggle through.
But there was money at stake here. A lovely lot of money, even if Sergei had, in retrospect, underbid the deal. And if there was one thing that could motivate both of them, it was the thought of that money sliding its way into their own pockets. Well, that and the challenge of it all.
Sergei and Wren grinned at each other, a little anticipation mixing in to go with the aggravation. One of the things that had bound them from the very beginning was an awareness that it wasn’t enough to be the best. You had to prove it. Not just to others, but to yourself as well. Council, Wren admitted ruefully, weren’t the only ones with ego.
Money. Prestige. Face. Ego. A little hamster, racing in her brain. What’s the connection, what’s the thread that binds it all? Let it rest, Wren, she warned herself. Let it unravel in its own time, its own pace.
“Noodles?” he asked, offering her a plate. She took it, and a pair of chopsticks, and started shoveling food into her mouth. It was going to be a very long night.
For the next few hours the only sound to come from the office was the sound of chewing, paper turning, and the tapping of Wren’s fingers on the keyboard. She couldn’t remember how many late-night sessions they’d had like this, hunting down some detail that would make a puzzle piece fall together. Sometimes a case—situation—was a question of trolling, like she had been doing with Old Sally, sending out lures and waiting for the answer to fall into your lap and close the case. But more often a job prep session involved chasing down dead end after dead end, until Sergei started to mutter the most interesting curses in Russian, which was how she discovered that a particularly pungent and heartfelt curse could and did sear the air with an interesting shade of blue electricity. Prep wasn’t fun, even if this was more enjoyable than the earlier know-nothing, assume-nothing stages. But prepping every step of the way was how you got the job done. Going in half-assed, as Sergei was forever saying, was the mark of an amateur or a glory hound.
The fact that he usually said this right after she had gone in half-assed was beside the point.
Tonight they had split the workload: he was sorting through gallery records his assistant had—under protest and with a few comments about overtime not quite under his breath—brought over, while she searched the Internet for any mention of one Matthew Prevost, art collector and obscenely wealthy person. Occasionally one of them would find something of interest, and put it in the “follow-up-on” pile. That pile was depressingly small, but around 10:00 p.m. Wren thought that she might have gotten a pipeline into his main home on this coast.
“Real estate records have an M. Prevost signing off on the loan. It was buried…looks like he did it through a second party or something.” The house was in upstate New York, north and west of Albany. Far enough away from the original site that his pet mage probably couldn’t translocate the stone directly—unfortunately reducing the chance that someone like Wren could sniff it back to him—but close enough that they could transport it by normal, and