IF MY STORY CAUGHT MEDIA ATTENTION AS FAR AWAY AS MY mother’s hometown in Umbria, the results were more complicated here at home. Max, who has more organizational savvy than I, knew that we couldn’t blindside Detective Finchley. Right before we left for the Global studios, Max called Finchley to warn him that a major balloon was going up involving me, Lawlor, and the deaths of Miles Wuchnik and Xavier Jurgens.
Even so, Finchley was angry that we’d kept him in the dark. “If you’d come to me straight off, instead of playing your cute game on television, I could have gotten a warrant to search Lawlor’s SUV. He got rid of the car, says it was stolen and he doesn’t know where it is, but the trail Liz Milkova followed suggests he sent it to a junkyard. Which means, as you know very well, that we’ll never find the backseat where you threw up, or the front fender that probably killed Tommy Glover’s mom. Lawlor bought a nice new Land Rover with his insurance money.”
“Terry, he confessed it all to me, and he tried to kill me!”
“I don’t doubt your word, but we can’t get the state’s attorney to agree that a confession you heard while you were heavily drugged carries weight.”
“But he also confessed right there on television,” Max said.
Finchley shook his head. “He said something wild on television, but he’s getting beaucoup e-mails and phone calls crying out for his vindication: his fans believe he’s the victim of a frame-up by Chaim Salanter and the so-called liberal media. The state’s attorneys from Cook and DuPage are very aware that they’re up for reelection—they don’t want to antagonize his massive fan base. And Global is exerting its own pressure on the state’s attorneys and the CPD, believe me. I’m doing my best, V.I., but, man, it would be so much easier if you’d brought me in on day one.”
Even so, Finchley was able to get Mulliner and Louis Ormond to strike deals. Ormond admitted that he had delivered money to Xavier Jurgens on behalf of his client, but insisted he knew nothing about any murders, or attempted murders: yes, he’d been in my office when Mulliner and Lawlor jumped me, but he’d been trying to persuade his client to use the law, not brute force, to restrain me.
Mulliner was on shakier ground: a search of hospital records proved that he’d removed ten milligrams of injectable haloperidol from the pharmacy on the day I’d been assaulted. Lawlor had paid him so much money for reporting on visits to Tommy Glover that he’d felt compelled to do whatever the cable star wanted; each demand he acceded to sank him deeper in Lawlor’s mire.
Our biggest breakthrough came from finding the owner of the rowboat. Murray haunted the fishing quay at Lake Tampier, offering rewards to anyone who could ID the rowboat Lawlor had stolen. Stan Chalmers finally came forward. He’d been afraid that his boss would fire him if he learned that Chalmers had been playing hooky, but Murray’s money, coupled with the drama of my story, got him to change his mind. Chalmers let Finchley take the boat; the evidence techs found Lawlor’s fingerprints on the prow.
The Internet gave us another break. When Les Strangwell, Helen Kendrick’s campaign guru, had gone up to the forty-eighth floor to alert Weekes to what Murray was actually saying, Weekes pulled the plug. Weekes also tried to kill any footage of the “Nancy Drew” episode of Chicago Beat, but by then the show had gone viral across the Web.
The blogosphere was filled with screams over the story. Wade’s detractors thought it was such a chilling story that he should be banned from the airwaves. When advertisers began backing away from Wade’s World as fast as fleas jumping from a dead plague victim, Harold Weekes gave Lawlor a leave of absence. This caused Wade’s hardcore supporters to picket Global One for a good ten days, demanding his reinstatement, but GEN’s senior staff noted that the pickets weren’t just a small group, but one that was decidedly unmediagenic.
All the time we’d been putting together the script for the show, Murray had worried that he’d lose his job. I’d scoffed: it just didn’t seem possible that a great scoop, one that gave Global the best viewer rating they’d ever had, would boomerang on him, but that’s what happened. A week after the Nancy Drew segment, Weekes fired Murray. By e-mail, not even giving him the courtesy of a phone call, let alone a personal meeting. He might agree in private that Lawlor had been a criminal, but he couldn’t forgive Murray for killing his golden-egg layer.