“That’s because it was in my bag.”
Shad halts in midstride, then makes a course correction back to his table, where he scans some more papers. His assistant jumps up from his chair and tries to help Shad find what he’s looking for, but Shad brushes him aside. Right now he’s remembering that, while he induced Melba Price to testify about Dad routinely keeping adrenaline in his black bag, he never asked her to list the full contents of that bag. God help me, I almost feel sorry for him. As a prosecutor I had some moments like that—rare, thank God, but it only takes one to scar you for life.
“How would you have explained an overdose of fentanyl,” Shad asks, “which would have been detected on autopsy?”
Dad purses his lips like a physics teacher asked to consider some improbable problem. “I would have said Viola was having breakthrough pain. In general, morphine would raise fewer questions postmortem, if for any reason an autopsy was done. Viola knew that. That’s why she chose morphine. But she did tell me that if the morphine proved ineffectual, I should use the fentanyl to be sure.”
Shad’s posture has gone rigid. “You can’t prove a bit of that.”
“I can prove I had the fentanyl in my bag.”
The DA blinks in surprise. “How?”
My ears are roaring. Once again, Shadrach Johnson has stepped off the edge of the map of known answers. It’s the prosecutor’s equivalent of Beyond This Point Lie Dragons.
“When Viola and I first discussed her desire to die peacefully, I prescribed fentanyl, so that we could have it on hand if she actually chose to go through with her plan.”
As Shad shuffles through his papers, his assistant pulls a single sheet from a different pile and hands it to him.
“Doctor, I reviewed the records of Leo Watts, Mrs. Turner’s pharmacist. He had no record of Viola Turner being prescribed fentanyl.”
“I didn’t prescribe it through Mr. Watts’s pharmacy,” Dad says equably. “Leo’s a friend, and a churchgoer, and since I knew how the drug might be used, I didn’t want him troubled by that kind of issue.”
“Or by the police?” Shad says sharply.
Dad inclines his head. “That too, I suppose.”
“Where did you get this fentanyl, Dr. Cage?”
“From a compounding pharmacy. But that isn’t the point, is it? The point is that I had the drug, and I had it with me that night.”
“How can we possibly know that?”
Dad shrugs. “Recall Melba Price, my nurse. She was well aware of the contents of my bag, since she checked its inventory regularly and maintained my drug stocks.”
Shad looks like a man who has awakened from a deep sleep with no idea where he is.
“I’d like to remind the court,” Dad says, taking advantage of Shad’s distress, “that Henry Sexton’s hard-drive recording doesn’t show me at all. It only shows Viola dying, and in a way I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy. I can promise you this: if I had meant to kill Viola, whether out of anger or mercy, I’d have done a hell of a lot better job of it.”
Shad should sit down. When a witness gets away from you like this, you have to cut your losses and try to make it up elsewhere. In this case, Shad has only his closing argument left, but that’s better than pushing further into uncharted regions. And yet . . . I see almost limitless anger in Shad’s face as he grasps the magnitude of his error, and anger makes some lawyers reckless. He walks around the table with a pugnacious stride and stops just short of the witness box.
“Dr. Cage, before any legal action was taken against you, I called your son, the mayor, and asked him to find out what had happened at Cora Revels’s house that night. Yet you refused to tell your own son anything. Isn’t that true?”
“Yes. I had just learned that Lincoln Turner was my son. Penn hadn’t the first idea that I’d had an affair with Viola Turner, much less that he had a half brother. How was I supposed to tell him that, especially with the DA making noises about charging me with a crime?”
“An innocent man would have confided in someone.”
“Well . . . I didn’t.”
“Once you were arrested, why did you jump bail? Is that the act of an innocent man?”
Dad takes a deep breath and looks past Shad to the jury. “I didn’t believe the sheriff was interested in learning who had really killed Viola. He’d decided I was guilty on the first day, and he stopped looking for any other solution after that.”
“All the evidence pointed to you, Doctor.”
“There was other evidence,” Dad says doggedly. “But Sheriff Byrd didn’t care about that. He’d been looking to get even with me for twenty years, and with Viola’s death, he finally got his chance.”
“Why would the sheriff want to ‘get even’ with you, as you say?”
“Because I knew things about him.”
“What things?”
“Things he wouldn’t want to be made public. I can’t be more specific without breaking doctor-patient confidentiality.”
“You’ve been quite cavalier about breaking rules thus far. Why stick at a little talking out of school?”
“Subpoena the sheriff’s ex-wife. She’ll tell you what his problem was.”
“Did you have an affair with her as well?”
“Ob-jection,” Quentin says in lazy tone. “We’re getting mighty far afield of the issue before the bar, Your Honor.”
“Sustained. Mr. Johnson, you seem to be taking shots without aiming at this point.”
In that moment, reality breaks through to Shad. I doubt he has ever felt more exposed or impotent than he does now. Strangely, I take no pleasure in his torment. If Billy Byrd were standing there like that, I surely would. But Shad, I can tell, believes he is on the side of right. The problem with the law as a profession is that belief, personal conviction, and even knowledge buy you nothing in a courtroom. If you can’t prove that something occurred . . . it never happened.
“No further questions, Your Honor,” Shad says.
“Thank you, Counselor. Redirect?”
“None.”
Judge Elder turns his head to the defense table. “Mr. Avery, do you have any further witnesses?”
“I do not, Your Honor. The defense rests.”
A deep silence follows Quentin’s declaration, like the silence after a storm has blasted all the birds and insects out of a field. No one can quite believe that the old wizard has emptied his bag of tricks. Shad looks like he’s hardly aware of what’s transpiring around him.
“Does the State call rebuttal witnesses?” Judge Elder asks.
“None,” Shad says dully.
“Very well.” Elder leans down to his mike. “At this time, I am going to instruct the jury. Then we’ll adjourn for lunch, and return at noon for closing arguments.”