Conviction – Bad Deals

By: Marie Thong

This week’s episode of “Conviction” titled Bad Deals opens with a woman hacking away at a stone wall, attempting to escape a locked room in a basement. Making it out, she wields a shiv made from the bottom end of a spoon and makes her way upstairs to find her captor on the couch, dead. Dropping the shiv, she opens the front door and makes her way into freedom. We learn that this woman is Sierra Macy (Allie MacDonald) who had been kidnapped and presumed dead 10 years prior when she was a junior in high school. Her captor was long-haul truck driver Peter Gunther; however, police had convicted one of Sierra’s teachers, Josh Fleck (Sean Kleier), for her kidnapping and murder. While this is already a problem in itself, NYPD found that Gunther had been in Iowa the night Sierra went missing. Even though Fleck was wrongly convicted for Sierra’s murder he could have been Gunther’s accomplice. But there’s another twist – the lawyer who put Fleck away was Sam (Shawn Ashmore).

The team advise Sam to stay off the case, but he is insistent on staying, claiming he is familiar with the case and with their five day time restriction the team are going to need him (But let’s be real, he just wants to prove he didn’t make a mistake.). He and Detective Quinn (Michael Brown) created an airtight case against Fleck having found blood on the passenger side door of his car and a shovel with fresh dirt in the back of his pickup, despite the latter no longer being valid. Hayes (Hayley Atwell) does her usual drill and hands tasks off to her team. Sam is off to go talk to Fleck in prison with Maxine (Merrin Dungey) (“to make sure he stays objective” *shakes head*). Frankie (Manny Montana) is to look for a link between Fleck and Gunther while Tess (Emily Kinney) reaches out to Sierra’s mum to see if Sierra is up to talking to them.

At the prison Fleck is, understandably, annoyed and eager to get out; however, his kidnapping charge still stands and there is a possibility trafficking could be added if they find he helped kidnap Sierra. Having been “bullied” into a plea deal, he and his lawyer saw it as the best situation as a jury may have sentenced him to life. Sierra had run away from home that night and called Fleck from the train station to say goodbye, which he puts as “teenager speak for stop me, please.” He picks her up and takes her to a diner where they talk and he tries to comfort her. Unfortunately, she gets up to go to the bathroom and never comes back. (Sam’s surely not convinced by the story and you can tell he’s definitely not going to remain objective.)

When Sam and Hayes go to visit Sierra and her mom, Carla (Kathryn Erbe), their front yard is crawling with reporters and press so the duo are forced to boulder through. Hayes goes up to talk to Sierra while Sam stays downstairs with Carla who is also, understandably, pissed (and slaps him). She had to move on, pack up Sierra’s stuff. Police stopped looking and they held a funeral all while her daughter was locked up and suffering. Talking with Sierra now, Hayes and Sam listen as she tells them that Gunther had shown Sierra clips of her mom speaking about her murder so that she’d know no one was coming for her. He had a pet name for her – baby girl. Sierra is able to corroborate most of Fleck’s story, but she admits that part of the night is hazy. She can remember getting in a fight with her mom’s then boyfriend, Liam (Trent McMullen), being upset, taking off and being at the diner with Fleck. But after that the night is hazy. She recalls being dizzy and her mouth becoming dry (like she was high), which points to her being drugged. Hayes then notices scars on Sierra’s arm, which she admits that she was a cutter and on the night she was abducted she’d cut herself. This explains the blood on Fleck’s door. (Throwing yet another piece of Sam’s “airtight” case out the window.)

A new witness is revealed when the team go over the latest facts in the case – a waitress at the diner had seen Sierra and Fleck together saying he’d been touching her inappropriately before seeing them leave together. Sam volunteers to go talk to the waitress, but Hayes objects as she needs someone who “doesn’t have an axe to grind.” She sends Tess and Maxine instead. The visit to the diner only proves Sam’s mistake further as the waitress, Melissa Deleon (Caroline Gills), admits she lied. Having seen Fleck and Sierra together she made an assumption about Flec that he’d creeped her out and saw him “inappropriately” touch Sierra. Therefore, when Detective Quinn came around asking questions, telling her that they needed evidence of Fleck and Sierra leaving together, she was happy to provide them just that.

Meanwhile Naomi (Ilfenesh Hadera) visits Hayes in her office explaining the latest in Wallace’s (Eddie Cahill) case – the US attorney found evidence Wallace leaked information of a confidential witness to Hayes so she could pressure him into recanting a statement. This is an action that got the case thrown out. Wallace is being offered a deal that will keep him out of jail, but would ultimately end his political career. After hearing this, Hayes informs Naomi that he didn’t leak the information (actually, he did) and is willing to testify to the fact.

Sam is still convinced Fleck played a part in Sierra’s kidnapping despite the fact that the waitress lied. Having gotten some new information from his buddy Detective Quinn, he informs Hayes that Fleck had been in an online relationship with a 16 year old girl in the past. However. Fleck informs Sam and Maxine that he thought Angela was 20 years old, as stated in her post. But Sam is still assured in his view, failing to remain impartial, almost as if it was his mission to railroad Fleck again.

Throughout the episode we see Maxine pop a number of pills, the first after a confrontation with Sam about his lack of objectivity toward the case. I’m seriously hoping that her drug addiction doesn’t come to fruition again, but if this episode shows anything, she’s could be headed for a downward spiral.

After Frankie has basically hit a dead-end trying to connect Fleck and Gunther he suggests using state dependent memory retrieval to see if Sierra can help put together the missing pieces. It uses psychotropic drugs to help recover the memories and works even better if the victim was on drugs at the time and we know she was from the symptoms she recounted in her interview (dizziness, dry mouth, disorientation, etc.). They bring on Dr. Lorraine Maltin (Ellora Patnaik) to supervise the treatment. Now at the diner, Sierra recounts the events of the night, but it doesn’t seem to reveal anything new until Sierra hears the sound of the back door opening. She remembers going to the bathroom to clean herself up, but someone came up behind her and she felt a pinch – she’d been injected with something. She was put into a trunk of a car (definitely wasn’t Fleck because he drove a pickup) for hours and taken to a house, but it wasn’t Gunther’s home. She didn’t go there until a few days later. Although she was blindfolded, she could still hear the sound of chimes.

Now at a bar Sam is licking his wounds, finally admitting to himself that he might have locked up the wrong person, drinking his sorrows away. However, the next day he picks himself up and decides to revisit Sierra’s case file and finds that at around 12:30am Carla’s boyfriend Liam was stopped by a state trooper for a broken taillight on a road that…would’ve taken him straight to Gunther’s house! Finally- an actual suspect! Two months after Sierra’s disappearance, Liam put a down payment on a condo, an $80,000 down payment the kind of cash he could’ve received after selling Sierra to Gunther.

Sam interrogates Liam, but the interaction leaves him empty-handed. It went much like any other: Sam accuses Liam, Liam gets annoyed and deflects and Liam storms out in a huff. His parting words? “Talk to my lawyer.” Sam decides to go visit Melissa again to see if she recognizes Liam.

Wallace is about to accept a deal with the US attorney when Hayes comes to the rescue. She testifies (despite not being sworn in) that the information that Wallace had supposedly leaked was sent to her by a paralegal who worked at the Chicago DA’s office. This is a paralegal who had since passed away leaving US attorney with no one to corroborate. This, in the end, gets Wallace a win as the US attorney drop the case against him.

Tess is able to find that Liam’s brother-in-law had transferred him the $80,000 confirming that Liam did borrow the money and did not get it from selling Sierra. Meanwhile, Frankie had been looking for connections between Liam and Gunther but instead found a connection between Gunther and Melissa (the waitress). Her name was found on payment receipts for Gunther’s home in Yonkers. Ahhh finally, a connection and a break in the case.

Unfortunately, everything doesn’t quite fall into place as Sam is currently at Melissa’s apartment. Melissa gets up to grab her glasses to correctly identify Liam when Sam notices some wind chimes hanging outside her window. Realizing she kidnapped Sierra he turns around to find a revolver pointed at his head. Luckily, the police soon burst through the doors and rescue Sam and arresting Melissa.

Sam revisits Fleck in jail giving him the good news, he’s a free man. Despite Sam’s remorse and guilt there’s no taking away the fact that Fleck spent ten years in jail, innocent. He lost 10 years of his life, 10 years he’ll never get back, something he will never forgive Sam for. Fleck is released from prison to an onslaught of press, but he’s greeted with a familiar face, Sierra Macy who embraces him in a heartfelt hug.

Hayes goes to visit Wallace at his office. He’s grateful for what she did and thanks her, but she sees right through him. Wallace was only willing to take the plea deal because her parents offered him a federal judgeship in the district court. Hayes is pissed, betrayed and ultimately, done. When Naomi shows up and invites her to a congratulatory drink she passes saying, “He’s all yours, Naomi.”