Mia smiles a little too quickly and brightly, and I realize she’s working hard to adapt to whatever comes next.
“We’re good, no problem,” she says, glancing at her watch. “You’d better hurry, huh?”
“Yeah. I’ll get Tim to drop me. I’ll see you guys in an hour.”
Chapter 30
A deputy lets me into the courtroom just as Judge Elder’s recess ends, and his friendly scowl makes it obvious he’s only doing it because he knows me. As I move to the front of the gallery, I realize there’s not a single open seat behind the bar. For a moment I consider taking one of the chairs immediately behind Quentin’s table—beside Doris—but that would draw too much attention to me. In the end, I return to the back of the room and lean against the wall with my arms folded. Quite a few people in the courtroom have recognized me, and they’re not shy about staring. A photographer I don’t recognize snaps my picture with a zoom lens.
When Sheriff Billy Byrd’s name is called, he rises from the line of deputies’ chairs against the left wall and makes his way toward the witness box. Byrd looks like a drugstore cowboy with a beer belly, or a used car salesman got up in a sheriff’s costume. He settles into the witness box with the confidence of a man who’s been there hundreds of times. As they swear him in, Shad Johnson stands up from the prosecution table with a Ziploc bag in his hand. Looking closer, I see a mini-DV tape inside the bag.
I hope Quentin isn’t as frightened by the appearance of that tape as I am. But from the back wall, I see what looks like tension in his posture.
“Sheriff Byrd,” Shad says, “this morning your chief investigator testified that on the morning Viola Turner died, you found a video camera in her sickroom, and that this camera was found to belong to the reporter Henry Sexton. Is that correct?”
“It is.”
“Your investigator testified that no tape was found in the camera.”
“That’s correct.”
“Were any other tapes found in the house?”
“Two blank tapes sealed in their original packages. Mini-DV type, brand Sony. Mr. Sexton informed us he had left four blank tapes for Mrs. Turner when he delivered the camera. All new and sealed.”
Shad holds up the Ziploc bag. “I have here one of those two sealed tapes, which were stipulated into evidence as State’s Exhibits Eleven and Twelve.
“Sheriff, Cora Revels told us that there was a tape in the camera when she left for her neighbor’s house, but none when she returned.”
“Ms. Revels made a statement to that effect when we interviewed her the day of her sister’s death.”
“What did you and your investigators surmise from this?”
“Whoever killed Mrs. Turner took the tape with him.”
“Why would the killer do that?”
Quentin could object here, but he doesn’t.
“Could be lots of reasons,” Byrd says, working his jowls like a man pondering this question for the first time. “Maybe the tape showed him injecting the lethal drug. Or maybe the victim had said things on the tape that he didn’t want anyone to know.”
“Did you search extensively for that missing tape?”
“Yes, sir, we did. We put our full effort into finding both that and the tape that Mrs. Turner had made for Henry Sexton. We searched the Revels house from top to bottom, and grid-searched the property. We searched Dr. Cage’s residence and office. But we still couldn’t find it.”
“Did you give up?”
Billy Byrd’s offended sneer makes plain that giving up is not a permissible action in his book of procedure. “No, sir. We did not.”
“What did you do?”
“Well. During the multistate manhunt for Dr. Cage, we figured out that he’d been moving around with Mr. Walt Garrity, an old army buddy from Texas. That was how he’d been evading capture. Garrity had brought an RV van over from Navasota, sleeps four. Got a kitchen and shower and everything in a tight little space. High-end thing. They’d been staying in that.”
I haven’t seen Walt in court, but I know he’s here somewhere. He told my mother that John Kaiser had informed him he was unlikely to be arrested if he kept a low profile, although Billy Byrd could arrest him at any time for aiding and abetting a fugitive. Knowing Walt, he’s up in the balcony behind Serenity, wearing some kind of disguise.
“What’s the significance of that vehicle?”
“Well, after Dr. Cage turned himself in to the FBI, I figured we ought to search that vehicle, if we could find it, on the off chance that he might have left something incriminating in there. Dr. Cage was the primary suspect by then, of course. He’d skipped bail with Mr. Garrity’s aid, and the two had abandoned the vehicle a day or two earlier, so we decided to try to find it.”
“And how did you proceed?”
“Carefully. We had some jurisdictional issues relating to that search. Mr. Garrity had some law enforcement contacts on the Louisiana side of the river, where they’d mostly been hiding, and those agencies weren’t too keen on helping us. But after putting out the word sort of quietlike, I got a call from a Concordia Parish deputy who’d located the Roadtrek van.”
“And where was it?”
“Parked in the garage of a lake house owned by Dr. Cage’s younger partner, Drew Elliott.”
A buzz of conversation fills the room, but a glare from Joe Elder kills it.
“What did you do then?” Shad asks.
“I consulted with you, the district attorney.”
“And what did I advise?”
“You said that since Garrity had been in law enforcement, we ought to be a little cagey about our search.”
“And what plan did we agree on?”
“We asked a Louisiana judge to write a search warrant on that van, specifying videotapes among some other articles.”
“And then?”
“A Concordia deputy searched the van right there in the garage.”
“And what did he find?”
“Several articles, among them one Sony mini-DV videotape, pressed up under one of the cushions that serves as a mattress in that vehicle. A Sony videotape that had been used but recorded over. Erased, in other words.”
“What did you do then?”
“I went down to the Ferriday Walmart and bought some Sony tapes exactly like those Henry Sexton had delivered to Viola Turner’s house.”
I’m not quite sure what’s coming, but a dizzy sensation of falling tells me that it won’t be good.
“And what did you do with those tapes?”
“I opened one and recorded sixty minutes of footage with the lens cap on.”
“Just what you would have done if you were going to erase a prerecorded tape.”
“Yes, sir.”
“And then?”
“I gave it to the CPSO deputy who had conducted the search. He removed the tape from Mr. Garrity’s van and bagged it as evidence. But he left the new erased tape in its place. We also left the van in place, as though it had never been searched.”
“Why did you do that?”
“So that Mr. Garrity wouldn’t realize that the tape hidden in his van had been found by the authorities.”
Shad turns away from Sheriff Byrd for a few seconds, giving the jury time to think about what has become a television cop show.