Down to the Liar(27)

“Can I help you?” I ask.

Instead of answering, she ducks past me to my desk and collapses into the beat-up chair I keep for clients. I sigh and shrug out of my jacket. I’m going to be late, which means I’m going to get another Mike safety lecture. And he might actually ground me this time. Awesome.

“Mrs….?” I say, having noticed the plain gold band on her left ring finger.

“Antolini,” she says.

The name sounds vaguely familiar, but not enough to raise red flags. “How can I help you, Mrs. Antolini?”

She takes a tissue from her floral purse. I wait as patiently as possible while she dabs at her eyes and blows her nose. I never try to comfort weeping clients. For one thing, it drags out the crying. For another, it’s just as likely to cause awkwardness as it is to cure it. Most people prefer I just wait it out.

“My husband was arrested a month ago for misappropriation of government funds. He worked for Lodestar. They do informational architecture for several government programs. If he’s convicted, he’ll remain in the maximum-security prison they’re holding him in for the next eighteen years. I can’t find the money he supposedly stole, so I can’t even get him out on bail.”

She stops to sniffle. So far, I’m not really hearing anything I can help with.

“I’m sorry that happened, Mrs. Antolini, but I’m not sure I—”

“It’s not that I think he’s innocent. I’m not that naive.” She wrings the rapidly disintegrating tissue in her manicured hands. “But I know my husband, Ms. Dupree. I know he’d never have done something like this on his own. They put him up to it.”

“?‘They’ who?”

“The New World Initiative. It’s a cult my husband joined just over a year ago.”

Well, that’s interesting. I remember now where I heard the name Antolini before. Mike has CNN on twenty-four seven, and I remember overhearing a story about Mr. Antolini’s arrest. I don’t recall the embezzlement angle, but I did hear the New World Initiative mentioned. I noted it at the time, because NWI is a leadership and personal development organization that St. Agatha’s sponsors an internship with. Then I get why Mrs. Antolini is coming to me.

“You want me to take them down,” I say, crossing my arms.

“I want justice,” she says quietly.

And don’t I know what that feels like. When Tyler died, I wanted to tear the world down. It didn’t help at all that the man who pulled the trigger was behind bars. I wanted justice. But there is no such thing as justice when you’ve lost someone. Mrs. Antolini just hasn’t figured that out yet.

“Fair warning: I only ruin people when I can prove they deserve it.”

“They deserve it. They used my husband to get money for themselves. All you have to do is find it and you’ll learn the truth.”

“Find the money?”

“No,” she says. “The blue fairy.”





“The blue fairy.”

I hear the words on repeat as I sit in the chapel of Holy Mother of God Church during my study hall period. I claim matters of spiritual pursuit, but I’m pretty sure Mr. Ulrich doesn’t buy my piety. Luckily for me, the academy bylaws don’t allow him to turn me down. It’s one of the benefits of going to a private Catholic school with its very own campus church. There are disadvantages as well, but right now I’m not complaining. I slouch in the straight-backed wooden pew and prop my ankles on the top of the bench in front of me. Not the most humble of postures perhaps, but I’m not exactly a god-fearing person. God has far bigger fish to fry than me.

To explain the blue fairy, I have to take you back to the bad old days seven months ago when I took down a Ukrainian mob boss to save about a hundred girls from his human-trafficking ring. It’s a long story that started with my dad, Chicago’s second-best grifter, contracting his forgery skills to Petrov, the Ukrainian mob boss, for a significant sum of money. During the job, my dad found out that the forged documents he was making were being used to smuggle Ukrainian girls into the country. So he tipped off the FBI (enter Mike Ramirez), and subsequently got himself kidnapped.

But my dad is nothing if not a planner. He knew he was gambling with more than his life trying to save those girls, so he hid a series of clues to keep me safe should anything happen to him. It mostly worked. Well, it helped. Okay, it was a terrible idea, and he should have known it wouldn’t stop me.