Shad breaks his rhythm here, and I realize he’s not sure where to go from here. He looks into the gallery, then up to the balcony. In the end he seems to settle on the face of Lincoln Turner, who’s watching him with desperate hope in his face. Almost imperceptibly, Shad nods, then turns back to my father.
“Dr. Cage, I believe a lot of what you’ve told us is true. The most effective deceptions are always based on truth, after all. But let me suggest an alternate scenario to you. After a lifetime of keeping secrets, Viola Turner wanted to unburden herself. She’d left a brief record of certain events for Henry Sexton, a reporter, that included her romance with you, your paternity of her son, and the murder of Frank Knox. And she told you she had done this. Why? Because like a lot of people in this room, Viola believed you were a better man than you are. And you played right along, didn’t you? Because all you had to do was carry out your side of the pact. She would be dead in a few minutes, and you’d have that tape, and once you erased it, no one would ever be able to prove what was on it. What could be more perfect? She’d asked you to kill her yourself, after all. The irony is almost unbearable.”
Dad seems to be focused on a spot on the floor, not his questioner.
“But something happened that you didn’t expect. Something made you panic. And I think it was the moment you realized there was a tape in Henry’s video camera, recording everything.”
Dad looks up slowly, like a tired old bear noticing some distant figure that might be either predator or prey.
“Who put that tape there, I don’t know,” Shad admits. “Maybe Viola’s sister, as Cora Revels testified. Maybe even Lincoln Turner. But once you realized that tape was there, you knew you weren’t as alone as you’d believed. Someone was watching you, setting a trap for you. How did you respond? Maybe you shut the camera off, or maybe you tried to brazen things out with Viola, thinking you could take the tape when you left. However it happened, suddenly time was your enemy. You wanted to run, but you couldn’t risk leaving Viola alive. Maybe she was fighting you by that time . . . but probably not. My guess is that she believed in you right up until the final seconds.”
Quentin looks as though he wants to interrupt this hypothetical, but something holds him back. I only hope his instincts are as good as they once were.
“You started to inject the morphine,” Shad says, moving closer to the witness box, “the morphine Viola wanted. But as you depressed the plunger, she saw something alien in your eyes. Something only an old lover would see. You meant to kill her, all right, but not out of mercy. You meant to silence her forever, so that the sins she wanted to get off her chest would never see the light of day. And that’s when you botched the injection. Maybe she struggled, or maybe you just lost your nerve. Either way, most of the lethal dose went astray, into her muscle tissue.”
Shad pushes on breathlessly, unable to do anything but play out the scenario running so vividly through his mind. The terrifying thing is, something tells me he might not be far from the truth.
“Now, you’re in trouble,” he postulates. “Viola’s sedated, but not for long. Her sister’s only fifty yards away, at a neighbor’s house. Your illegitimate son is at a motel in town—”
“I didn’t know that,” Dad protests, but Shad plows on like a fever-blind horse.
“You open your black bag in the hope of finding some answer to your problem . . . and that’s when you see the adrenaline.”
Shad steps even closer to my father, who has gone very still. The image hurls me back to my eighteenth year, when Dad was being sued for malpractice. The lawyer who cross-examined him after months of depositions moved in just as Shad is doing, and on the night of that cross, my father had his first heart attack.
“You know a large dose will overload her weak heart,” Shad pushes on, “and if anyone raises questions”—he flips up his fingers like a magician after making something disappear—“you can say you made a failed attempt to resuscitate her. Under normal circumstances, of course, no one would raise any questions. After all . . . you’re Tom Cage. You’ve ‘helped’ patients into the hereafter before, and no one ever questioned you.”
Dad now refuses to look Shad in the face. Disgust is written deeply in his features, in the very angle of his head.
“You cross over to the camcorder and take out the tape,” Shad continues, “to make absolutely sure there’s no record of your final injection. Only you missed something. There’s a hard drive attached to that video camera, set to take over when the tape runs out. Unaware of this, you go back to the sickbed and inject Viola with an overdose of adrenaline. Then you step back into the shadows.
“Seconds later, the woman you claim you loved is jolted from sedated sleep in terror—terror powered by a drug that bursts blood vessels throughout her disease-ridden body. In her struggles, Viola rolls over the remote control lying in her bed, switching on that hard drive and creating the record that will ultimately lead us all to this courtroom. In her final death throes, she calls out your name, but you remain in the shadows, waiting for her to fall silent forever. Once she does, you leave the house, two videotapes tucked safely in your bag.”
Shad is breathing hard when he finally stops speaking. He looks as if he’s forgotten there’s anyone else in the room but himself and the man he hopes to break.
“Isn’t that what happened, Dr. Cage?” he asks with surprising conviction.
Shad’s tale has gained some traction in the jury box. Several faces show clear signs of emotional upset: flushed skin, pale lips, sweat on the forehead.
When Dad answers, it’s in a voice I recognize from my youth—the one he used to chide me with when I let my imagination run a little too wild.
“You should have been a screenwriter, Mr. Johnson. That’s a dramatic story you just told. But like a lot of movies, from a medical perspective, it’s absurd.”
Shad seems taken aback by Dad’s matter-of-fact tone. “Absurd? How is it absurd?”
“Had I botched an injection of morphine, as you suggested, and I still wanted to kill Viola, I could have used the fentanyl I had ready to hand.”
“Fentanyl?” Shad echoes, rifling his memory for every possible association with that word.
“It’s a potent narcotic analgesic,” Dad informs him. “A painkiller—only it’s one hundred times more powerful than morphine. If I’d needed to finish off Viola in a hurry, as you suggested, I could have given her a little fentanyl, and that would have been the end of her. No pain, no muss, no fuss. That’s what a devious doctor would have done.”
After a few seconds of processing, Shad turns and walks to the prosecution table, where he picks up a sheet of paper, then starts back toward the witness box.
“Doctor, the evidence report introduced by the sheriff’s department does not include fentanyl as one of the drugs listed as confiscated from the house.”