A Touch of Minx

by Suzanne Enoch

  “Yes, but you broke and entered, and I helped you.”

  Great. Apparently she’d broken her one female friend, as well. “Technically I was just leaning way in to look through some open windows,” she decided. “I didn’t touch anything, and I didn’t see anything suspicious. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have asked you to do this.”

  “I wouldn’t have agreed to come along if I hadn’t wanted to.” They stopped for a red light, and Katie faced her. “You did this all the time. It would give me a coronary, but you like it. I can tell. Was today because you needed evidence, or because you…wanted to climb over somebody else’s walls?”

  Pretty astute for a soccer mom, Samantha thought, though she didn’t say that out loud. Instead she shrugged. “I picked security and art recovery for a second career, I guess to try and keep what I liked most about my first career. So to answer your question, I could have spent a week looking into any legal investigations on the Picaults, or I could spend twenty minutes and climb over their wall—and I like wall climbing. Fast and practical. And fun.”

  “Well, ‘fun’ is a matter of opinion, but I think I understand.”

  “So if I promise not to take you out for any more B and E’s, you won’t be afraid to go to lunch with me again?”

  “If you don’t think I’m too boring to spend your time with.”

  Samantha snorted. “What I do might be scary to you, but believe me, Katie, what you do every day terrifies me.”

  Katie laughed, visibly relaxing. “Well, since I did come to one of your B and E’s, now you have to come to one of Mike’s baseball games. Fair is fair.”

  “I might just do that.” And sooner than Katie realized.

  Her best chance to get a look at Toombs’s stuff was to wait for the guided tour on Thursday, but Samantha wasn’t going to sit on her hands until then. With about an hour remaining before Mike Donner got out of Leonard High School, she drove home to take another look at the manila folder of paperwork Miss Barlow had given her and the list of “suspicious characters” from Livia and her friends.

  The list consisted of fifth and sixth grade boys, who were all apparently evil except for Lance Miller, who was very hot. She grinned as she settled into a chair at the wide library table. There was also one teacher on the list, the art instructor who came by the school twice weekly. Miss Marina wore very short skirts, it seemed, and always had the cutest boys, including Lance Miller, sit in the front of the class so she could sit on the edge of the teacher’s desk and show off her legs.

  The same logic that told her that an adult crook would have taken items more valuable and more easily resalable than Anatomy Man also said that a female teacher might risk her career for an actual teenage boy, but not for a gender-neutral, parent-approved hunk of plastic and latex. No, this had the fingerprints of a kid or kids all over it.

  She pulled out the police report. Officer James Kennedy seemed to have come to the same conclusions, noting that nothing was broken, no locks forced, and no other items missing. His final statement, “PRANK,” echoed her own.

  Both Donner and she had offered to replace Anatomy Man, but she understood the lesson Miss Barlow and Principal Horner were trying to deliver, annoyed by the theft or not: Stealing was bad. Buying a new model might make teaching anatomy easier, but that whole life lessons thing was more complicated than that.

  “I have a Diet Coke for you, Miss Sam,” Reinaldo said, walking into the library with the can sitting on a tray and accompanied by a chilled glass filled with ice.

  “You rock, Reinaldo,” she said with a grin, sitting back as he placed the items at her elbow. “And you read minds, don’t you?”

  “I try,” he said, smiling back at her as he tucked the tray beneath his arm and vanished again.

  The can was ice cold, so she popped the tab and took a long drink straight. Nothing else in the folder seemed helpful, so she went over to the computer in the corner and logged onto the Internet. Once she’d called up Google, she typed in “Anatomy Man” and the manufacturer. A couple of places offered him for sale, including eBay. When she checked that out, though, the seller was in Nebraska. Probably not Miss Barlow’s Clark, then.

  She did enlarge the photo, though. Anatomy Man stood six feet tall, had no winkie, but did possess male nipples and washboard abs. His skin peeled off in sections, allowing for the exposure of muscles and arteries and veins, and those were pliable to expose organs and bones and the brain for study and removal. If she squinted she guessed he did look Superman-like—in a vacuous, expressionless kind of way.

  At least now she’d recognize him if she ran across him. Checking the time down in the corner of the monitor, she logged off, snagged the folder and her soda, and headed for the garage. The parents of Leonard High School students were mostly upper-middle class, but a Bentley was beyond the reach of most of them. Most of Rick’s cars, in fact, would be über-conspicuous there. Pursing her lips, she decided on the silver ’05 Ford Explorer, what Rick called his “incognito” car.

  Driving the SUV felt like driving a bus at first, but she settled into it as she headed across the bridge toward suburbia. Samantha arrived in front of Leonard High just as the final bell rang, and she pulled onto a crowded side street where she had a pretty good view of the whole front of the school.

  Katie and her gunmetal blue Lexus were already there, stopped in front of the elementary school across the street. The ensuing tangle of cars—mostly SUVs like hers—and kids gave her a whole new appreciation for soccer moms. She wasn’t sure she’d even be able to pick her own offspring out of the crowd, because whole herds of the kids, especially the girls, seemed to be clones of one another. Same hair styles, same clothes, same backpacks, same shoes even. “Yipes,” she muttered, adjusting her side-view mirror to keep Katie’s Lexus in sight.

  After a couple of minutes she spotted towheaded Mike and the same two friends he’d been with on Saturday. The boys jogged to Katie’s car and piled in. Once the Lexus pulled into traffic, Samantha moved in two cars behind them. It might have been simpler if she’d known where Mike would be playing ball, but she still couldn’t come up with a logical reason for her to be asking that.

  The car stopped at a park about a mile from the Donners’ house, and the boys climbed out again. After pulling a bag that looked like it held bats and gloves out of the trunk, Mike waved to Katie, and she drove off. Samantha put the Explorer into park and shut it off. The trick would be to talk to Mike without making him look like a snitch in front of his friends—if he did actually know anything and that nervous twitch she’d seen hadn’t been just a teenage thing.

  Once the Lexus turned the corner, Mike and his friends hefted their backpacks and the bat bag and headed across the park—away from the baseball diamond. Hm. Samantha started the SUV again and kept pace with them on the street.

  Two more kids of about the same age waited for them at the far edge of the park. The five of them, talking among themselves and obviously in a hurry, trotted down the street in the direction of a strip mall bordered by a fast food place with a hardware store and a couple of empty-looking warehouse buildings behind them.

  Well, this was getting interesting. The boys didn’t look like they were heading for the burger joint, but they clearly had something in mind. She pulled the SUV up in front of a dry cleaner’s at the near end of the strip mall, waiting to see where they would go.

  Her cell phone vibrated, making her jump. “Christ,” she mumbled, pulling it from her pocket and flipping it open. The office number. “Jellicoe,” she said, her gaze still on the kids.

  “Miss Samantha,” Aubrey said, “I have Gwyneth Mallorey on the other line. She says that she wants her whole alarm system removed because she can’t stand the sound of the door entry chime.”

  The boys disappeared around the back of the second warehouse. “Dammit. Doesn’t she know she can program the chime for any sound she wants?”

  “Apparently not. I tried to tell her that, but she doesn’t want to he
ar it from me.”

  Still cursing under her breath, Samantha climbed out of the Explorer. “Tell her I’ll be at her house in fifteen—no, twenty—minutes, and I’ll show her how to program all of the tones.”

  “Will do.” He paused. “Did I interrupt something?”

  “No. I was just doing some research.”

  She closed the phone and pocketed it. Before she went anywhere, she needed to make sure Mike wasn’t meeting up with drug dealers or anything. Wow. Her, feeling protective over other peoples’ kids. Shaking off the sensation that this was really weird, she stopped at the corner of the dry cleaner’s to watch as the boys passed her. “You do have the camcorder this time,” Mike was commenting to the skinny kid beside him.

  “I have the camcorder. And it’s got this cool fish-eye focus we can try out.”

  “Whoa, that’ll be freaky,” a third boy put in as they continued down the alleyway.

  “Especially with you on camera, Evan.”

  “Oh, shut up!”

  “You shut up!”

  “No, you shut up!”

  With a half grin that echoed their laughing, Samantha retreated to the car again. She practically read peoples’ faces and voices for a living, and these boys weren’t nervous or apprehensive about anything. And even though she hadn’t quite figured out where they were going, neither had this been a waste of her time. She knew now that Mike Donner lied. He’d lied about his plans and his whereabouts to his mother, and maybe he was keeping a couple of other secrets, as well.

  She headed back to the Explorer and left the strip mall. Back to her other job now. She was working on so many of them that it was getting hard to tell them apart.

  Chapter 11

  Wednesday, 8:01 a.m.

  Richard had the taxi drop him off outside the Manhattan police precinct station. Used as he was to being responsible for billions of dollars, for making life-altering decisions, for buying and selling what amounted to his and others’ lives on a fairly regular basis, walking alone into a police station made him a little nervous.

  It hadn’t been that way before Samantha—one place was as good a battlefield as any other. But Samantha had altered his perspective about a great many things—not the least of which was his own vulnerability. His personal safety, his possessions, and most of all his heart, could all be gotten to in ways he would never have previously expected.

  Light flashed just to his right. Only years of familiarity enabled him not to flinch and to keep the cool, slightly bored expression on his face. Reporters and bloody tabloid photographers. They crawled around the public areas of police stations like cockroaches.

  “Mr. Addison!” one of them called out, starting a rush in his direction. “Why are you here?”

  “Are you here because of Miss Jellicoe’s arrest in March?”

  “Rick, look this way!”

  He ignored all of them as he shouldered his way through the door and into the interior of the station. The cop faces inside were on the whole more difficult to read, but he understood the looks. They were curious, suspicious, and some of them were not happy at all to see him—a sentiment he returned. Five months ago the officers from this precinct had arrested Samantha, and though they’d been following procedure, though they’d been proven wrong and she’d been the one to help them prevent a robbery at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, he would not forget them driving her away from him in the back of a police car. Ever.

  “I have an appointment to see Detective Gorstein this morning,” he told the officer at the front desk.

  The officer nodded, picking up a phone and putting a hand over his other ear against the considerable noise around him. A second later he hung up again. “He’ll be right with you, Mr. Addison. You can wait here, or take a seat on one of the benches over there.”

  Richard looked where he indicated. “I’ll wait here, thank you.” He already felt like he needed to check his pockets to make certain he still had his wallet and his phone.

  A minute or two later, Sam Gorstein approached through another doorway. “I didn’t expect you to be on time,” he said, proffering his hand. “Welcome back to New York, Mr. Addison.”

  “Thank you.” Richard shook his hand, taking in the tasteful, understated gray suit and the quality black shoes with the scuffs on the toes as he did so. “And thank you for taking the time to see me.”

  “Mm hm. Like I wouldn’t be directing traffic if I’d turned you down. My desk, or somewhere more private?”

  Richard wasn’t asking for anything illegal, but neither did he care to have his personal business overheard and speculated about—especially when his business on this occasion was also Samantha’s. “Private.”

  “I thought so. This way.”

  They headed into a small interrogation room, where Richard shrugged out of his overcoat and set it over the back of a chair. His own suit was black with gray pinstriping, worn more in honor of his nine-thirty meeting at his office than because of this little conference. Considering that his attire probably cost four or five times as much as the detective’s, however, he wasn’t above indulging in a little one-upmanship when the opportunity arose.

  “Do you want coffee or something?” Gorstein asked, taking the opposite seat.

  If he did, he’d probably have to go get it himself. “No, thank you.”

  “Okay. What can I do for you then, Mr. Addison? And how’s Ms. J? Staying out of trouble?”

  Ah, the other reason he was less than fond of Sam Gorstein. Unless he was greatly mistaken, this Sam liked his Sam, and he didn’t like that one bloody little bit. “She’s well. She’s actually the reason I’m here.”

  The detective cracked a grin. “Why am I not surprised?”

  “It’s completely aboveboard, I assure you. She’s looking into an old theft, one the Met experienced a decade ago and would like to keep quiet. I wondered if you’ve ever run across the names Gabriel Toombs or August and Yvette Picault while you were investigating any of your higher-profile art or antique thefts. Japanese items in particular.” The Met theft had been ten years ago, but as Samantha had pointed out, and demonstrated, crime was a habit. If they’d strayed once, they’d probably done so numerous times. And Gorstein was in the business of solving robberies.

  “Do I look like Huggy Bear or something?”

  Richard frowned. “Beg pardon?”

  “Right. You’re English.”

  The detective made that sound like an insult. There were some who found his accent sexy. “And?” Richard prompted.

  “And I’m not some snitch you two get to go to when you need information.”

  “I look on it more as an opportunity for mutual benefit. Samantha locates a stolen item, and you perhaps get to stop someone who buys very expensive stolen property. She has assisted you before.”

  “I still have the feeling that I’d be solving a lot of very expensive crimes if I locked up Ms. J again.”

  Thanks to a great deal of self-control, Richard kept his hands from clenching. “As I believe we’ve explained, Samantha’s only connection to theft is her father. And you had him in your custody.”

  “Yeah, until the Feds and Interpol stepped in.”

  “Since we both have other things to do, let’s save the reminiscing for another time, shall we?”

  “Fine by me. Anything actually within departmental regulations I can do for you, then?”

  People didn’t refuse Richard very often, and he didn’t like it one bloody bit when it happened. Neither did he make a habit of accepting an answer other than the one he wanted. “So because the statute of limitations has expired, you’re not interested. I understand,” he said brusquely. “If Samantha doesn’t find the things by next Wednesday, the Met—your Met—will lose a very prestigious traveling exhibit to the Smithsonian. Just be sure you understand that.” He pushed to his feet, picking up his coat.

  “Toombs and Picault,” Gorstein said from behind him. “How long will you be in town?”

  “I�
��m leaving at one o’clock today.”

  The detective sighed heavily. “Spell them out for me, and I’ll look into it. Give me your cell number, and I’ll call you before you leave.”

  Richard nodded. Sometimes it was fairly easy to get people to do what he wanted, particularly when what he wanted happened to be the right thing to do. “It was nice to see you again, Detective.”

  “I’ll bet.”

  When Samantha woke up, she was sprawled across Rick’s side of the bed. Apparently her subconscious didn’t like having him gone even when her conscious mind thought it was kind of cool to have the run of the place once in a while.

  Rubbing a hand across her face, she sat up. Nearly nine o’clock in the morning. Regular-people hours was still proving to be the hardest thing to adjust to in the legit life—in the old days things didn’t start to get interesting until after midnight. At times she’d been nearly nocturnal. Now, though, she had an office where people expected to be able to contact her during daylight hours, and most of the people around her only caught the beginning of Leno or Letterman, and were fast asleep by the end.

  Rolling out of bed, she threw on some sweats and went down to the gym in the basement. Working out was more fun when Rick was down there, too, and she could compete with him, but she managed to lift weights and do the stupid StairMaster thing for nearly an hour.

  When she went back upstairs to shower, Reinaldo had set out a muffin and a chilled Diet Coke on the coffee table in the master bedroom suite. Ah, it was good to be the queen. After she showered and sat down to eat, she checked her cell phone for messages. Nothing.

  “Dammit, Stoney,” she muttered, and punched his mobile number. It rang once before the automated operator came on the line to say that the phone she was dialing was unavailable. So much for him being reachable if she wanted to call him. She tried again, this time dialing his house in Pompano Beach. The phone rang six times and then his female, Cuban-accented answering machine picked up.