Read A Touch of Minx for Free Online Page A

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 ter rific 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 resume.
    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 complain.
    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