But no act of superstition or faith could save McNally now. He was adamant he’d never recover. After all, he could easily turn to Lifepoint, part of the North American Syringe Exchange Network, whose goal is to eliminate the epidemic transmission of diseases such as HIV and hepatitis C. He could walk out of the needle exchange, grocery bag filled with all the amenities for pleasure: a hundred needles, cookers, powder to break down crack cocaine, and enough Narcan in case he “falls out.” As an experiment, he tried the antidote once. He shot up more heroin than he could handle, and as soon as his lips turned purple and tingly dots clouded his eyes, he injected the Narcan the way a paramedic would. “I came right out of it,” he said. “I got real sick—the shakes, diarrhea, you know, but I survived.” Ryan numbed himself against the real possibility of McNally dying.
In January 2010, a distressed Anna Weaver, a potential new client, called Ryan with pressing legal questions, and they agreed to meet, but Weaver never materialized. Ryan thought nothing of it, no-shows fairly routine, but three months later, he awoke to grisly details in the newspaper of Anna Weaver having been bludgeoned to death on Main Street, up the road from Ulrich Law Office. Investigators would determine that Weaver and her murderer, Collin Smith, had carpooled to Milwaukee to score oxy, all the while Smith intent on some bizarre drug-world vigilante justice. Who buys, who uses, and is it fair? Ball-peen hammers are traditionally used to harden metal fabric, but back home in Oshkosh, high as a bat, Smith beat Weaver’s existence into a soft, bloody pulp, and then he stabbed her arm with a needle because “that’s what the junkie deserves.” The murderer’s fiancée and seven-month-old son looked on. A baby, like Mercer Mayer’s little mice, would always be found in some square inch of these snapshots. I could never wrap my brain around these ghastly scenes of family togetherness—or wrap my arms around my own children tightly enough. Was there anything Ryan might have advised Anna Weaver to prevent her gruesome death?
Certainly my dad, when wearing his Dr. Ralph K. Baker hat, had played a role in familiarizing me with violent crimes in childhood. As a psychiatrist, he testified in court about whether regional atrocities were attributable to mental illness. He submitted reports in high-profile criminal cases ranging from the mutilation and murder of Carla Lenz by John Ray Weber in backwoods Wisconsin to Eagle Scout Gary Hirte’s quest to “get away with” the murder of loner Glenn Kopitske. He talked unabashedly about his work life. Now that I was a parent, protective instincts were plaited into my existence, and I’d think longer and harder about drugs, violence, and the short circuit between them.
No single case in Ryan’s criminal-defense career was ever a duplicate. Each case was resolved in its own way, depending on the client’s record and overall attitude, the assistant DA working up the case, the judge at the helm, and, generally, everybody’s moods just as much as the state’s laws. This time around, Ryan finally managed to strike a deal with the DA, in exchange for McNally’s hand-to-hand purchases for the MEG unit, taking down the group of dealers that emerged after Lazarus Jackson was locked up. He shot heroin between setups, and Ryan kept expecting a call from agents to report an OD. “They don’t care if you shoot dope on a setup,” McNally told me. “All they care about is getting convictions.”
When Ryan arranged McNally’s deal, he said to the DA, “I thought Darlene Eaves and the other CIs already brought down the big dealers.”
The DA laughed, sarcasm a tone he struck only after hours. “What do you mean? Putting people in jail doesn’t solve the drug problem?” After a long pause, he continued, “Prices just double for a little while until new dealers take their place.”
Before reporting to jail, to serve six months instead of six years, McNally, cranked up on heroin, stopped by to see Ryan. A buddy who came along with McNally—in fact a future client—picked up Ryan’s old guitar from the corner of his office. McNally was a walking cadaver, so gaunt in the face the outline of his teeth protruded through his sallow cheeks. His eye sockets were like a fun-house novelty. As McNally’s pal picked an elegant rendition of “Nutshell” by Alice in Chains, McNally nodded out, and back in, rhythmically, eyes rolling around, possessed.
He’d been using smack with his latest in a string of girlfriends, and according to McNally, she had a nine-year-old daughter. Ryan imagined the girl locked in a bathroom or hanging out at the library, Burger King, a coffee shop—wherever children hide from parents who are users. “I’m an addict. She’s an addict,” McNally said. “This is no place for a kid.” As Ryan meditated in the wake of their departure, sober and depleted, he looked around his office and then picked up his phone, placing an anonymous tip to Child Protective Services, even though he waffled briefly between his loyalty to McNally and his paternal instincts. In any event, his call proved moot. McNally’s girlfriend overdosed on heroin a few days later and ended up hospitalized.
Lazarus Jackson wept to the judge before his sentencing, “The allegations against me are just crazy. I can barely sleep at night thinking about this.” Winnebago County had suffered the seventh highest rate of heroin-related arrests out of seventy-two
