“Was there anything special about the tape you replaced Mrs. Turner’s tape with?”
Byrd tries and fails to conceal a smile of satisfaction. “Yes, sir. I planted a little GPS tracking device in it, so we could know where that substitute tape was at all times. We also planted a similar device on Mr. Garrity’s van, one that worked on a different frequency.”
“I see. Did you learn anything else from the videotape?”
“Yes, sir. Our fingerprint man determined that there were two sets of fingerprints on the tape.”
“To whom did they belong?”
“The majority belonged to Henry Sexton, but there were several others that belonged to Dr. Tom Cage.”
A hundred heads in front of me turn and look at the person next to them.
“And how did your expert match those?” Shad asks.
“The same way he matched the ones on the morphine vial. From the prints Dr. Cage gave in Jackson when he applied for his concealed-carry permit back in 1991.”
“I see.” Shad looks at the jury as he asks his next question. “When did all this take place, Sheriff?”
“The day after Dr. Cage turned himself in to the FBI, which was the day of Henry Sexton’s funeral. We didn’t know where Mr. Garrity was at the time, but he had a motel room in Vidalia. I learned later that he was actually staying at Dr. Cage’s home in Natchez.”
“While Dr. Cage was in custody?”
“That’s right.”
Quentin should be objecting all over the place, but he sits like a man who’s been punched so hard he can no longer hold up his hands to guard his chin.
“So, Sheriff, is that the end of the saga of the missing videotape?”
“No, sir.”
“What happened next?”
“The next night, Mr. Garrity showed up to retrieve his van from Dr. Elliott’s lake house. We began tracking our devices at that time and also put visual surveillance on him. He visited a couple of places of interest.”
“Which were?”
“One was the CPSO jail, where he visited Dr. Cage, who was there under FBI protection. This was when the Bureau had temporarily taken over that facility.”
“I see. What was the other place?”
“Well, later on, after dark, he drove over the bridge to Mississippi.”
“And you were tracking him via the GPS devices you’d planted?”
“Yes, sir. Both of them. The one on the van, and the one in the videotape.”
“What happened next?”
Billy Byrd can’t contain his pleasure; a smarmy smile breaks out on his heavy face. “When he started over the bridge, we were tracking both signals. But when Garrity was a little over halfway across, only one signal kept coming, while the other stayed fairly static.”
“How did you account for that?”
“Well, about this time, our tailing unit had seen Mr. Garrity’s arm flick something out of his window, in the direction of the left-lane bridge rail.”
“And what did you observe on the tracking unit?”
“The GPS signal from the tape stayed in midriver for about fifteen seconds, then went dead. The one in the van kept right on driving, all the way to Ryan’s Steak House.”
“And what did you conclude from this?”
“That Mr. Garrity had dumped what he thought was the tape from Viola Turner’s house into the Mississippi River. I deduced that he had done that on Dr. Cage’s order, probably passed to him during the jail visit only hours earlier.”
After about five seconds, during which time I am silently screaming at Quentin to object, Shad says, “Thank you, Sheriff. No further questions, Your Honor.”
The click and whir of Quentin’s motorized wheelchair comes so fast it’s as though Shad’s voice triggered it. He cannot allow that testimony to go unchallenged. He rolls right past the podium and up to the witness stand, speaking in an incisive voice.
“Sheriff Byrd, do you realize that Dr. Cage’s fingerprints on a blank tape found in Mr. Garrity’s RV in no way prove or even indicate that this tape came from the house of Viola Turner?”
“Yes, I realize that.”
“Then what makes you think that was the tape Viola had made for Henry Sexton?”
“The lot number.”
At the back wall, I cringe as though I’ve taken a sharp blow. I know what’s coming now.
“The lot number on that tape proved it was from the same lot as the two tapes we found in Mrs. Turner’s house. That meant they had been sold in the same store at about the same time.”
“Very well,” Quentin says, trying to cover as best he can. “Do you have any film of Walt Garrity driving that van that night?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Does it show his face?”
“Well . . . I don’t know. We have film of the van. I don’t know if it shows him driving. It was a dark night. But my men tailed him from the lake house.”
“Mississippi deputies working in Louisiana?”
“Uh, no, these were Louisiana officers.”
“Sheriff Walker Dennis’s men?”
“That’s right.”
“Working under Sheriff Dennis’s orders?”
Sheriff Byrd is slow to answer. “Not exactly. The mess they had over in Louisiana after that Forrest Knox was killed caused a lot of problems over there. Some interagency problems, as well.”
“But those men will swear under oath that they saw Captain Garrity get into the van?”
“They absolutely will.”
“Sheriff, I have to say, this entire episode sounds like something out of Mission: Impossible rather than a small-town murder investigation.”
“We do what we can to stay on top of technology.”
“I’m sure. But to what purpose, Sheriff? If you’d found the tape Mrs. Turner supposedly made, why go to all that trouble to pretend you hadn’t?”
“May I answer that, Judge?” Shad asks.
Judge Elder leans forward and says, “The witness will answer, Mr. Johnson.”
“Well . . . being as the tape we’d found had been erased, the district attorney figured we might learn a lot more about what Dr. Cage and Mr. Garrity was up to if they didn’t know we was onto them. We thought the adrenaline ampoule might have been in that van as well. If Garrity was going to try to destroy it at some later date, we wanted a record of that.”
“And was the adrenaline ampoule in the van?”
“Not that the deputy could find.”
“Yes or no, Sheriff?”
Byrd grits his teeth. “Negative.”
“Sheriff Byrd, if Dr. Cage was guilty of murder, why do you think he would keep a very incriminating piece of evidence for, let’s see, seven days? And keep it where it could easily be found?”
The sheriff shrugs. “Guilty folks do crazy things all the time. They’re under stress.”
“So you assumed at that time that Dr. Cage was guilty?”
“Well . . . yeah. He looked guilty as hell, pardon my French.”
A couple of people chortle in the gallery. From behind, Shad Johnson looks like a man trying hard to keep control of himself.
“Look,” says Sheriff Byrd, “Doc Cage had probably erased the tape on the first day. He probably knew it couldn’t really hurt him much—since erased videotapes can’t be restored—and he had other things on his mind.”
“Like trying to find out who had really murdered Viola Turner?”