Author's Question: Do you folks want to see part of the media blitz or just read about it indirectly through the reactions of the main characters?
Disclaimer: The Buffy and Angel characters are Joss Whedon's; the Daria characters were created by Glenn Eichler; and everyone else was created by me.
X X X X X
After reading the article in the newspaper, Amy Barksdale dressed, collected her sister from the adjoining hotel room, and cleared out of the building within ten minutes, well before anyone could figure out where they were."
"I don't know why we're doing this, Amy," Rita protested as they drove away. "It's not like anyone knows where we are."
"You mean, apart from the bellboys, the concierge, the maids, the security guards, four cab drivers and half the DA's office?"
"Right!"
Amy sighed. Getting through to Rita was sometimes more trouble than it was worth. "Just humor me, okay?"
"I always do," Rita said with a long-suffering air. "So, were you planning to just drive around Los Angeles all day or did you have a particular destination in mind?"
"I thought we'd cruise around until we ran out of gas in the worst possible neighborhood. Would you prefer the barrio or The Valley?"
Rita scowled. "Funny, Amy. I'm sure you get my point."
Amy did. She thought about what Rita had said. She could go to the LA County Jail and the Barksdale sisters could try to sort things out with Daria; she could go to the DA's office, find Carla Fisk, and try to come up with a way to deal with the incipient media blitz; she could head over to Angel's office -- while she probably wouldn't get an enthusiastic response, but she was fairly sure they'd be isolated from the reporters; or they could go to Disneyland.
She mentioned these options to Rita -- minus Disneyland -- and she said, "Why should we hide?"
"Um, because we have no desire to throw ourselves in front of a howling mob of reporters?"
"And why not?" When Amy didn't answer right away, Rita went on, "Obviously this is going to be a huge story. We need to be sure we have our side out there before a lot of people who don't know what they're talking about try to paint Daria as a murderer who's trying to get away with it."
"Rather than the victim she is," Amy mused.
"Exactly!" Rita said. Rita's argument had its merits. Even though Amy was the best-known person in her family (after, unfortunately, Daria), she shied away from publicity. She'd had to be bullied into doing a book tour when April 10, 1997 had come out.
Rita, who had always been more of a people person than either Amy or Helen, would have been a lot better at the job. "So," Amy said, "You think the best option is to coordinate our efforts with those of the DA's office?"
"Yes!" Rita said. "I can't see why you'd want to do anything else."
Of course she couldn't.
Nonetheless, it was possible she was right. "Hand me my cell phone," Amy said. "I'm going to call the DA's office."
"Go ahead and try," Rita said.
Try? In any event, she pulled into a shopping center parking lot and made the call. Fifteen minutes later, when she was still on hold, she gave up.
"It's possible the media blitz has already started," Amy said dubiously. Plus, of course, a normal day's business for a DA's office probably wasn't doing anything to lighten the load. "We should probably drive right over." As they left the parking lot, Amy said, "You knew it wouldn't be worth the effort to call, didn't you?"
"Mmm-hmmm. I also knew that you wouldn't believe me if I told you." Then she let out a brief laugh. "Amy, we're both Barksdales. We're stubborn. Sometimes to the point of being pig-headed, or you and I wouldn't have barely spoken for over ten years. The important thing is, we're here now, and we're doing what we can to help Daria."
"You do realize that famous Barksdale stubbornness will probably have her not speaking to us for the fourteen years, right?"
"She's alive and she'll be free. That's the important thing."
Rita, as usual, was supremely confident.
Amy, as usual, wasn't so sure.
X X X X X
Carla Fisk's boss had immediately pulled her off of all of her other cases so she could deal with the reporters. This didn't happen often, but under the circumstances the District Attorney felt that the reporters would prove too distracting for Carla to be able to give her full effort to the rest of work. He'd also made it clear that this wasn't a knock on her abilities. (On the other hand, Carla noticed that he was also making it clear that she was the one in the line of fire.)
This was after a meeting yesterday in which he'd gone over every part of the case in excruciating detail, to make sure "All the i's were dotted, the t's crossed, and there's no way any of this can come back to bite us in the ass. After all, it's usually not our job to let murderers back out on the street -- even ones with medical reasons."
"And if this had been a paid expert witness for the defense, sir," Carla had said, "I would have been as skeptical as you are. But this was Lynette Vaughn. She's helped us break more phony psychiatric defenses than you can count."
"Did you contact the victim's families?" he asked.
"No one to contact, sir. Faith Lehane's first victim was a single man whose sole surviving relative has late-stage Alzheimer's, and her second was an older man whose parents have been dead for twenty years, who never married, and who left no children."
"It is possible he was gay," the DA had said.
"No bereaved lovers of any gender have shown up," was Carla's reply.
"That's good," the DA had said. "No victim families means no one showing up to complain about how we're trampling over victim's rights by freeing a killer. Still, I don't have to tell you how many hit's the LA prosecutor's office has taken over the last ten years or so. The McMartin Trial. OJ Simpson. Rodney King. Reginald Denny."
"With all due respect, sir, I don't think this is going to come out as another way we've screwed up." And anyway, the McMartins -- accused of multiple counts of child abuse -- had probably actually been innocent. "I think if we paint it right we can come off as both protectors of the innocent and the public."
"Then I'd be aggressive about it if I were you," he'd said. "Wait until the story is published, then start making phone calls."
Carla hadn't even had the time. She'd made sure she got to the building the second it opened, and she already had a half dozen calls. (The LA Times early edition hit the streets before 6 AM; local morning show producers and radio talk show hosts read it as soon as it came out to see if there were any stories they needed to keep an eye on. One TV producer, two morning show producers, and two talk show hosts had already called. So had Kal Endicott, who was interested in doing a lengthier follow-up piece.
This was likely to make the Times reporter's career. People and police departments had been looking for Daria Morgendorffer for exactly four years, and Kal Endicott -- who had no doubt been assigned the general courtroom beat because the more experienced reporters had more interesting things to do -- was the man who'd lucked into breaking the story.
Carla had nothing against Kal Endicott, who had resisted what had to have been a desire to sensationalize the story, and had played fair with everyone involved, including the DA's office, Amy Barksdale, Dr, Vaughn, and Daria and Faith themselves.
It was ironic, she thought as she debated which calls to return. (One of the talk show hosts was a Howard- Stern wannabe, without Stern's dignity and decorum. No chance in hell was she appearing on that one.) Even she thought of Daria and Faith as different people.
Legally, they weren't; there was only one body between them; but they were so different.
If only they hadn't been, maybe this wouldn't have been an issue.
Of course, Carla thought soberly, as long as she was making wishes about this case, maybe she should wish for Willard Jay Harbaugh to have been drowned at birth.
Carla settled in, made sure she was comfortable, and, putting on her best I'm-from-the-government-I'm-here-to-help-you voice, started returning phone calls. "Hello. Mr. Endicott? Yes, this is Carla Fisk from the ADA's office. I understand you have some more questions for me?"
X X X X X
Other people besides radio talk show hosts were reading the paper that morning. So were things that weren't exactly people.
Most of the latter looked at the news and, if they entertained any wild notions about going after the imprisoned Slayer, dismissed these thoughts almost as soon as they came into their head. Lilah Morgan had had Wolfram & Hart staff call most of the company's major clients and tell them that Faith Lehane was under their protection; whether they held a grudge against her or just wanted to notoriety of taking down a Slayer, it would be best if they didn't if they wanted their working relationship with the law firm to remain pleasant, amiable, and entirely free of random decapitations.
Then Lilah had taken the best muscle she could whistle up on short notice -- there were idiots out there who'd attack anyone, and Lilah wasn't stupid enough to assume she could brazen her way out of any situation by the sheer force of her personality and the evocation of the name Wolfram & Hart -- and had taken a whirlwind tour of demon, vampire, lycanthrope, and other miscellaneous "ghoulies and goblins and long-legged beasties and things that went bump in the night" hangouts in the greater Los Angeles area and told them the same things she'd told their clients.
This left her severely short on sleep, but Wolfram & Hart had sorcerous means of dealing with that. Lilah didn't like having to use them, but under the circumstances she'd rather deal with the side effects than angry supervisors.
She knew the story would come out at some point, it being just a matter of time before some local reporter picked up on the fact. That it came out on Tuesday morning caught her off-guard. A little digging indicated how: Kal Endicott, the junior LA Times reporter who'd broken the story, had just happened to be in the right place at the right time.
Lilah was thankful that she'd spent the last three days cluing everyone in to the new state of affairs or she could have gotten in a lot of trouble. The Senior Partners were not notoriously forgiving.
She sighed, directed some of the junior staffers to monitor the growing media coverage -- Wolfram & Hart had a media room in which you could get feeds from any radio or TV station in the country -- and settled back to watch the fireworks.
X X X X X
Wesley put out a hand to stop Angel. "Are you going to explain the reason for this good mood of yours? I mean, considering the events of the past couple of days, and the public firestorm that is sure to come down on Faith and everyone even remotely associated with her, I would expect you to either be holed up in your room or venting your frustrations on the local demon community. Instead, you're here, acting as though you didn't have a care in the world."
"Not at all, Wes," Angel said. "The publicity does worry me. But most of it is going to come down on Amy Barksdale and that district attorney. Daria is safely in jail. And at the moment the prospect of those two women facing a frenzied mob of reporters doesn't bother me all that much."
"Oddly enough," Wesley said with a faint trace of sarcasm, "That wasn't my main concern."
"I get that. You know me. I'd be brooding . . . if I had something to brood over."
Wesley kicked himself that it had taken him this long to figure it out, but he caught one. A grin breaking out on his face, he said, "You have a plan."
Angel said, "A plan exists. But I'm not the one who created it. I just know about it."
"And the reason you haven't told the rest of us about this is . . . "
"Because the fewer people who know about what it is, the less likely it is to get out. I trust you. I trust Cordy and Gunn, for that matter. But the person who came up with the plan doesn't know you and I promised her I'd keep the details to myself."
"May I at least assume that, despite the outcome of yesterday's court battle, Faith may not be gone for good?"
Angel smiled and clapped Wesley on the back. "You can assume anything you like, Wes."
Which was all the confirmation Wesley needed. "Thank you."
"For what?" Angel said as he left.