A quick, surprising smile lit his face. “Or at least, you see you cannot see, if I cannot be more plain. This touches on my partner.”

I jumped, but only internally; and I wondered why I had. “I don’t think there’s much I can do for you there.”

“You have done, if not much, then some at least already.”

“I have?”

Linn shook his head, impatient, and coughed again. “She will not have you longer on this case. She will not countenance it, even to discuss. And yet, I think she held great hope of you, of what your skills might bring into the light. She seems now as if all her hope is fled, but will not, when I ask her, have it so. She is my friend; I cannot see her thus.”

I wanted to tell him how many times I’d seen friends with troubled minds, and felt I had to do something about it, and did, and made it worse. But that was one of life’s little lessons that was best learned through on-the-job training, anyway. And maybe in this instance he was right. “So you want me to go back to work for you and not let her know?”

“I’d not serve her such a turn. She has forbidden it, and I’ll not go behind her to have it done in secret, nor above her, to have it ordered done in her despite. Still, if it were done, and no one had the ordering of it…”

“Except me, of course,” I said, because I really did see, this time. “You want us to have never had this conversation, and me to go on sticking my nose into places where it’s likely to get blown off in the hopes of finding this illusionist, and Rico to have nobody to yell at for it, if she finds out I’m doing it, but yours truly.”

Linn smothered another cough and studied the tabletop. “Put so, I would deny it if I could. But no, that is the meat and bone of it.”

“You could have saved yourself all that scansion. I never meant to quit on Rico’s say-so.” All right, I’d thought I meant to, for a few hours the day before, but nobody but me believed it anyway, so I wasn’t counting it.

He stared at me. I think he was halfway between grateful and guilty, which is an unenviable piece of real estate. “You will… the danger will be great.”

I quirked the eyebrow that didn’t have stitches in it.

He looked away and rubbed his eyes. “If I can, I’ll help. Take no foolhardy chances; you’re to seek information, not to act.”

I stood up. “If I’m not working for you, it’s not your business how the job gets done. Your partner would understand that.”