I’ve got a story on the life and death of ex-Bolingbrook cop Drew Peterson’s third wife, Kathy Savio, in the May issue of Chicago Magazine.

I’ve done reporting before that could be described as investigative, but nothing quite as heavy as this one. I didn’t end up quite uncovering any monstrous new facts, and may have discovered that, on the angle I took into this story, no monstrous facts lay. But I’m pleased with its dutiful telling of an overlooked part of the sensational Peterson story.

But the whole time I was working on the piece—and doubting I’d ever be dumb enough to tackle such a piece again—I wondered:

How will investigative reporting ever get done in the future?

I wondered this as I spent four full months reporting, writing and working with the editors to finish the piece. Yes, I did other stuff in between—writing for Ragan, work for other organizations—but this effort involved:

• Interviewing at least two dozen people, many of them a few times, a few of them many times. Phone calls long and short, often after hours, always sweaty—trying to get tons of information from busy people, trying to get any information from reluctant people, trying to assess the reliability of half-insane people. Trips over hill and dale to sit in deadly quiet living rooms and back rooms of greasy spoons for as long as it took to get truth from people, many of them stricken with grief or fear.

• Endless Internet searches. The existence of the Internet is a curse as much as a benefit, because when you just had a phone and a legal pad, you didn’t waste whole mornings doing fruitless Googling. You either got on the phone or you hit the bricks. And if you procrastinated in those days, you did so by smoking cigarettes. (What a net loss!)

• Wakeful nights spent wondering: Have I really done enough reporting? What if I tried to call this guy? What if I asked that woman this question?

• More wakeful nights wondering: Will my four full notebooks and 60,000-word electronic notes file come together in 4,000 coherent words? Dear Lord, let me choose the right words! There are no agnostics on a feature-length story deadline.

• Long talks with nasty people about nasty things. I’ve told people, and I’ve meant it, that the murder suspect himself was one of the most charming people I interviewed in the course of reporting this story. There were others who I found pleasant and some even fun, but I was also hung up on, bullshitted, yelled at, bullied and manipulated. People aren’t at their best when you’re calling them to ask about a murder case; and it’s not the best people who you’re always calling, either. The whole subject, especially with the backdrop of the Chicago winter months, had me feeling pretty low at times.

• De-listing of my home phone number after a lawyer told me I was nuts for looking into this case from the angle I was looking into it. For several weeks I entertained fantasies of being gunned down in the snow while walking my daughter home from school on a dark winter afternoon. Surely the scenario was outlandish, but you didn’t entertain it this winter, did you?

• Taxing drink-ups. One of the best investigative journalists I know is a teetotaler but I don’t know how he does it. I needed to hear myself talk about this story a lot, to see what I really thought about it, and to get ideas about leads to pursue. In order to hear myself talk that much, I had at the very least to get my friends drunk, so naturally I got drunk too.

• Amazing amounts of time and energy spent on the phone with magazine editors and fact-checkers who, with the help of lawyers, were protecting me from myself, and protecting the magazine from any potential lawsuit. I’m grateful now—there isn’t a questionable syllable in the piece—but the process stretched out for almost a full month. And it gave me the sense that the magazine had much more to lose from a lawsuit than to gain from a splashy story—and that their decision to commission me to make this investigation was an act of uncommon courage. Should that be true?

And all this for—wait for it (I sure did!)—$3,500. I have a wife, I have a kid, I live in the city, I have expenses: To keep my head above water at that rate, I’d need to do 20 of these kinds of stories in a year. If I tried to do that, I’d be the murder suspect.

When he read the story, my dad—an essayist and an ad man who’s used to putting all his energy into the thinking and the writing, and not familiar with all the mucking about this story clearly required—asked me in an e-mail what this experience was like. Was it interesting? Was it boring? Was it scary? Was it limiting? What he did not say was, “What on earth possibly inspires you to do this?”

Mark Ragan, a former newspaper reporter, theorizes that reporters have egos. They want to be the only guy or gal in the room who knows how shit works. And they write stories to prove that’s exactly who they are.

There’s truth in that. And especially living in Chicago, if you don’t know how politics work, you worry that you don’t know anything. So in one sense Chicago Magazine does me a favor by merely lending legitimacy to my own curiosities.

Still, as newspapers and magazines cut their budgets and thin their ranks and reporters grind out more and shorter and shallower stories every day, I’m beginning to wonder:

Am I the sort of weirdo America is increasingly depending on to get our investigative reporting done in this country?

Is it actually our plan to rely on hordes of half-educated desperadoes with a gnawing and erratic curiosity and an ego with an elephant’s appetite?

Come to think of it, I guess that pretty much describes journalists down through the years.

But as I take off my brown investigative journalist suit—until the next time I forget that political writing is not the most efficient use of my particular gifts—I wonder, I worry: As print declines and online news continues to trend away from heavy stories, how many reporters out there are going to be paid enough by how many publications to half-justify this kind of endeavor?

And what will it be like if there’s nobody in the room who knows how shit works?