A Touch of Minx

by Suzanne Enoch

  “You and your war guys,” she chuckled. “The pieces are nearly a thousand years old.”

  Rick frowned. “Why did Joseph give you this job now? The statute of limitations had to have run out three years ago.”

  She nodded. “Apparently the Japanese are accepting applications and bids from museums wanting to host the return engagement of the exhibit, and they’re rejecting the Met because of the theft. Viscanti says they made it pretty clear that the only way for the Met to redeem its honor and be acceptable again for any traveling exhibit from Japan is for them to produce the armor and swords.”

  “Which is where you come in.”

  “If possible. He doesn’t seem to hold out much hope, but I think he figured he didn’t have anything to lose by giving this a shot.”

  Richard realized he was letting his ice melt after all, and he licked almond praline off his knuckles. No, Joseph Viscanti didn’t have anything to lose, but Samantha Jellicoe did.

  Adjusting her mom purse, her harried expression, and the piece of paper with school letterhead she’d snagged from the trash, Samantha walked up to the front of J. C. Thomas Elementary School, bypassing the wheelchair ramp in favor of the steps. A security guard met her just inside the doorway. “May I help you?” he asked.

  “I certainly hope so,” she snapped, clutching the paper harder. “My daughter’s teacher asked me to ‘stop by,’” she pretended to read, “as if I can just take off from work on a whim.”

  He gave a sympathetic nod. “School hours are hard when both parents work full—”

  “Both parents?” she snapped back at him. “That would be a miracle. I would appreciate if you would stop insulting me and tell me where I can find Miss Barlow’s class.”

  His face reddened. “Sure. Fourth classroom down on the west side—to the right.”

  She stuffed the paper into her purse and stalked off. “Thank you.”

  The kids were all gone, but she hoped it was early enough that Miss Barlow would still be inside her fifth grade classroom. If not, she would take a look around for any clues. Okay, she felt like a goof, but Livia had asked, and she didn’t want to lie and say she’d checked things out when she hadn’t.

  Most of the school was under one roof, joined by long hallways and a central auditorium. Friendly drawings of big-headed friends and family and rainbows and elephants lined the walls. She’d been to a couple of different elementary schools when Martin settled them somewhere to scout a job and Stoney bullied him into enrolling her, but it still looked and smelled foreign—like cookies and washable paint.

  The door to Livia’s classroom stood open, and a slim, dark-haired woman with an actual teacherly bun on the back of her head stood in front of a blackboard writing out lessons. “Miss Barlow?”

  The woman jumped, putting a hand to her heart as she turned around. “My goodness, you startled me. Yes, I’m Simone Barlow.”

  “Hi. I’m Sam Jellicoe. I’m kind of Olivia Donner’s honorary aunt. She—”

  “You’re Samantha Jellicoe,” Miss Barlow repeated, her brown eyes widening. “Rick Addison is your—”

  “My good friend,” Samantha interrupted, though a little bit of her was curious to see how the teacher would describe her relationship with Rick.

  “Yes, yes. Your good friend. What may I do for you, Miss Jellicoe?”

  “Call me Sam. Livia told me that your anatomical man went missing, and she asked if I’d check into it.”

  “But I thought you did security inspections and installations.”

  Miss Barlow seemed to be a member of the Rick Addison fan club—or at least of Rick’s Chicks, the online version. “I do, mostly. I also work with museums to track down missing or stolen artifacts. Livia thought I might be able to help here. Do you have a police report?”

  “Yes. Principal Horner gave me a copy of it. Would you like a photocopy?”

  “That would be great.”

  The teacher went to her desk and pulled some papers out of the wire basket labeled For Miss Barlow in pretty, flowery letters. “I’ll be right back. Olivia’s desk is over here.” She pointed at the seat in the front row, second from the left.

  “Thanks. No hurry.”

  As soon as Miss Barlow left, Samantha took out her digital camera and snapped photos going around the room. Then she walked back to the door and took a look at it. It had a lock, as did the one at the other end of the room. The second one stopped her for a second.

  When she looked at the frame, she immediately noticed a tiny patch of sticky residue right above and another one directly below the latch plate. Someone had put a piece of tape across it to keep the door from catching and locking. If the classroom doors had been fitted with dead bolts it never would have worked, but these were interior doors, and the lock mechanism was part of the knob itself.

  Hm. Somebody with access to the doors while they were open or unlocked, which meant during the day. An inside job, then, and planned in advance.

  Just to be sure she wasn’t jumping to conclusions, she checked the windows that lined the far wall. Rows of sprouting lima beans and tomato plants and crazy-painted ceramic pots crowded the shallow sill. No spilled dirt, no broken art projects, no footprints or smears—the thief or thieves hadn’t come through this way.

  “Here you are,” Miss Barlow said, returning to the room and walking up to hand her two sheets of paper. “I had the feeling that taking down the report was as far as the police would go.”

  “You’re probably right. Anatomy Man would be pretty low on their priority list.”

  The teacher sighed. “I understand that. We had a very exciting interactive unit planned. It’s…it’s aggravating.”

  “Aren’t some of your parents willing to replace him?”

  “Yes, though I don’t think they realize that Anatomy Man is a very precise life-size model shared by six classrooms. We purchased him just a month ago, and he cost the school nearly three thousand dollars.”

  “Wow.” Samantha folded the papers in half. “Thanks for the report. I’ll see what I can do.”

  “Thank you. If you could recover it, this would be a terrific lesson for the kids about consequences and doing the right thing.”

  Gosh, maybe if she’d had a couple of those lessons, she wouldn’t have fallen into a life of crime. “Livia said the unit starts a week from Monday?”

  “Yes, though I’ll have to switch it with the unit on electricity if Anatomy Man isn’t returned. I had the whole three weeks planned out to coordinate with a hands-on experience. The kids retain so much more that way.” She briskly restacked the police report, then slammed it back into the in-box. “Besides wasting my time to rewrite the lessons, it just…makes me very angry.”

  Another lesson in seeing the aftermath of a theft from the perspective of a victim. No wonder she never used to socialize with marks. Samantha forced a smile. “I’ll see what I can do.”

  “Thank you, Miss Jellicoe. Sam.”

  “Don’t mention it.” Please don’t mention it. Sam Jellicoe, elementary school sleuth. She’d never live it down. Even worse, every thief in the country would start hitting all the places where she’d done security work, because obviously she’d fallen on hard times.

  The next step would be to get a list of people with access to the classroom during the day, though that list would probably include every single student, teacher, and janitor who attended or worked at J.C. Thomas Elementary School. Maybe Olivia would be able to help her out with that. That would have to wait until tomorrow, though, because she had a real job to get to work on—rare Japanese armor and samurai swords. Something she could actually put on her résumé.

  Samantha hummed to herself as she sat beneath the windows of Solano Dorado’s library. The morning sun felt warm on her back as she flipped through one of Rick’s books on antiques. She didn’t consider herself particularly skilled at singing, but nobody except for the marble busts of DaVinci and Aristotle had to suffer through it, and they couldn’t complai
n.

  Japanese history, the whole honor versus death thing, fascinated her, and she took her time looking at the various photographs in the book. That was one of the things her father, Martin, hadn’t gotten about her—when she contracted to steal something, she tried to learn everything she could about it first. As far as Martin was concerned, a theft was nothing more than a business transaction, and the item itself didn’t matter.

  But she liked to learn the age and provenance of items, liked to know what she was holding in her hands and what it meant in the course of history. And apparently now this interest extended to items she meant to return to their proper owners as well as those she relocated to other interested parties.

  “Gardening ideas?” Rick asked, indicating the book across her lap as he strolled into the room. He carried his cell phone in his hand; his chief assistant, John Stillwell, was in Los Angeles working on a plan to make Addisco the main subcontractor in an LAX computer upgrade project.

  She shook her head. “Samurai and shogun armor,” she replied. “Some of these pieces are amazing. You don’t have any books on Japanese history, do you?”

  “Probably. Check the list on the computer.”

  He sounded a little sour, but she ignored it. She liked this part of a theft, and he wasn’t going to spoil it for her. “Okay.”

  Rick nodded. “Have you gotten the packet from the Met?”

  “Not yet. Sometime today, though, according to Viscanti.”

  “So you’re just doing some advance research.”

  Again she heard something in his tone that said he wasn’t happy about something, but if he wasn’t going to say, then she wasn’t going to ask. “Can’t be too thorough, I guess.”

  “Perhaps you can make time to talk about your garden plans at brunch tomorrow.”

  “Sure.”

  His phone rang, and he glanced down at the display. “Then I’ll leave you to it,” he said, vanishing down the hallway again.

  As he left the library, Reinaldo, the head housekeeper, came in, a thick manila envelope in his hands. “Good morning, Miss Sam,” he said in his light Cuban accent. “This just arrived for you.”

  She took the bulky envelope from him. “Thanks, Reinaldo.”

  “Of course. May I get you a fresh Diet Coke?”

  “That would be great.” All of Rick’s employees knew she liked Diet Coke and detested coffee. There had probably been a memo or something.

  Once he’d gone to fetch her soda, she took a moment to enjoy the abrupt feeling of anticipation, then opened the envelope from the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Joseph Viscanti had enclosed a letter restating the circumstances of the theft, not very helpful but at least pretty concise.

  He’d also included some crime scene photos, the police report, the book of the samurai exhibit, and a CD of the surveillance videos taken the night the theft had likely occurred. It actually amazed her how little the Met and the cops knew about what had happened.

  Viscanti wanted her to figure out who’d pulled the job, where the loot had gone, and where it was now. Well, actually he only cared about the last bit, but she needed to know all of it if she meant to solve it. And she did mean to solve it. Otherwise Viscanti and the other museums who respected his opinion would figure it wasn’t worth the trouble to hire her to recover their missing goodies, and she’d be back to security inspections and upgrades and finding elementary school property full time. And she really didn’t like doing that.

  The last—and only other—job Viscanti had asked her to take a look at had gone exactly nowhere. A small, portable urn, no surveillance, no prints, no signs at all. Probably some very lucky small-time hood. This theft didn’t look any more promising, but it hadn’t been luck that enabled somebody to get away with the goods; to manage a full suit of shogun armor and two priceless swords, all belonging to the same guy and packed in different crates, somebody had known what they were doing—and they’d been paid well to do it.

  A low skitter of adrenaline flowed into her muscles as she settled at the library work table. Finding out where something had got to and retrieving it wasn’t as flat-out-hair-raising as a straight-up theft, but it was close. And today, close was good enough.

  Chapter 4

  Saturday, 12:15 p.m.

  “Remind them that I own Computech,” Richard said, shifting the cell phone from his left to his right ear. “Zellman likes the Computech system, and anyone else offering to install software from my company is a glorified middleman.”

  “Right,” the crisp, upper-crust London accent of John Stillwell replied. “I’ve already pointed out that you can provide the hardware from ACG at near cost; hopefully the Computech connection will put us over the top.”

  Rick grinned at the enthusiasm in his chief assistant’s voice. Hiring Stillwell six months ago was one of the most brilliant decisions he’d ever made. If not for John he would be in Los Angeles himself right now, instead of looking forward to a foliage discussion with Samantha in the morning.

  “You have a break tomorrow, yes?” he continued.

  “Yes. I thought I might get a head start on the Burei-Halfin merger and look through the—”

  “John, take the day for yourself,” he interrupted. “Go to the beach or a movie studio or something.” Samantha was always teasing him about being more sympathetic toward his minions, as she called them. “Be a tourist. On my dime, of course.”

  “Are you certain, Rick?”

  “Tomorrow’s Sunday. Relax a bit. I intend to.”

  For a moment, all he could hear was silence. “Well, you know, I’ve actually always wanted to go to Disneyland.”

  Rick grinned. “Go to Disneyland, then. And any luck on that other item?”

  “It’s on its way to Florida. You should have it Monday morning.”

  “Excellent. Have fun tomorrow.”

  “I will, Rick. Thank you.”

  He closed the phone and sat back. Though he didn’t believe in premature celebrations, the LAX job seemed to be in the bag, as it were. And once he had LAX, O’Hare and La Guardia and a dozen other of the larger facilities would likely follow suit. The idea of taking on airports and their accompanying responsibility had given him pause, but when he considered it, he would trust his own products and personnel over anyone else’s.

  With a deep breath he straightened and pulled his computer keyboard into easy reach. Reinaldo had delivered Samantha’s package to her, so for once he knew what she was up to. So two dozen e-mails waited for him to answer, and then he could do one of the rarest things in his large repertoire and relax for the next day and a half.

  A knock came at the half-open office door, and he looked up. “Did you solve your mystery already?” he asked, smiling as Samantha walked into the room with her usual grace and dropped into the chair opposite his desk.

  “Totally,” she replied. “And I figured out Jimmy Hoffa and the Man in the Iron Mask on the way here from the library.”

  “Well done. Let me finish these e-mails, then, and let’s fly down to Nassau and have dinner at Montagu Gardens. They prepare a wonderful lobster.”

  “In the Bahamas.”

  “Well, yes.”

  She snorted. “You are so smooth. I’m actually here to pick your brain about Japanese antiquities. But since you’re busy, I think I’ll go talk to Livia Donner about Anatomy Man and then go for a run. Will you have time after?”

  “I will.” He refused to let her see that his heart lifted whenever she asked for his aid, assistance, advice, or knowledge about anything. He didn’t want her using it against him.

  “Cool. And maybe I’ll let you have your way with me while I’m all hot and sweaty.” She gave an exaggerated scowl, clearly amused at herself. “Or maybe in the shower. That might be more fun for you.”

  “I’ll manage either way,” he commented, finally giving in and grinning. “Thanks for being so thoughtful, though.”

  Samantha pushed to her feet. “Oh, you know me. I aim to please.”

>   Richard refrained from commenting on that, instead watching her backside sway as she left the room. He needed to go for a run himself, but he would settle for an hour in the weight room down in the basement later—unless Samantha had been serious about sex when she returned. At thirty-five years of age, a round or two with her could fairly well satisfy his exercise requirements for the day.

  Besides, it was the weekend, and though taking any time off was still a novelty for him, he was attempting to become accustomed to it. One of the things his ex-wife, Patricia Addison-Wallis, had complained about during their divorce had been that he worked from the moment his eyes opened in the morning until he closed them at night. Considering that he’d discovered her in bed with his friend and former college roommate, Peter Wallis, he didn’t have much sympathy for her complaints, but he’d learned the lesson. He would not put his work before his relationship ever again. And certainly not when that relationship was with Samantha Jellicoe.

  He was halfway through the e-mails when his cell phone rang again. As he checked the caller ID, Richard frowned. “Walter?” he said, hitting the talk button.

  “Rick,” Walter Barstone’s voice returned. “I tried Sam’s number, but she didn’t answer.”

  “She was going to take a run,” Richard said, standing. Except when it came to Samantha’s well-being, he and Walter weren’t anything close to being allies, or friends. Walter had practically raised Samantha, had been her mentor and her fence for the high-end items she stole. And Barstone would have been completely content to see her away from her new life and back into her old one. “Is something wrong?”

  “No. Could you have her call me when she shows up?”

  “Not if you don’t tell me why.”

  “Mm hm.” In the ensuing silence Rick could practically hear the wily old wheels turning in Walter’s brain. “Okay. Gwyneth Mallorey wants Sam to be there when they mount the security cameras at the house, to make sure they don’t mess up the ‘aesthetics’ of the place. According to Mrs. Mallorey, if Sam’s working for her, she’d better show up.”