“That’s not what I meant.”
“I find that very easy to believe, Sheriff.” Quentin touches his joystick and executes a quarter turn away from Byrd. “Let me suggest another scenario to you. One that might easily explain the fingerprints and the lot number.”
Byrd looks at Shad, but Shad doesn’t risk trying to send him any signals.
“Henry Sexton leaves a camcorder at Viola Turner’s house, hoping she will record memories from her past. Viola tells Dr. Cage, who visits her almost every day, about this arrangement. She does just as Henry Sexton suggested and makes a tape. But perhaps one day she decides she has said too much—more than she might ever want to become public, even after she’s gone. So she asks Dr. Cage to erase it. In his fiddling with the camera, he removes the tape, leaving his fingerprints on its plastic case. Quite possible, yes?”
“I suppose. But that’s not what Miss Cora said happened.”
“True enough. But another scenario occurs to me, Sheriff, one that better fits testimony we’ve already heard. Let’s assume Viola did make the tape for Henry that Cora Revels described, one filled with potentially embarrassing material for both herself and Dr. Cage. All right?”
“Uh-huh.”
“She initially plans to keep the tape secret from her old lover, but in the end she tells him about it. As a test, as Cora suggested. On the night of her death, she tells Dr. Cage to take the tape with him when he leaves, and to give it to Henry Sexton. Viola is alive when he leaves, mildly sedated by morphine, as usual. After leaving the house, Dr. Cage watches the tape—a natural impulse, and something most of us would do. On it are very personal things that he appreciates, but that he would prefer that his wife and children not have to deal with. Dr. Cage now has a moral dilemma.
“Only hours later, he learns that Viola is dead and that he may be charged with her murder. Shortly after this, he realizes he has become the object of a witch hunt by your department. So he packs the tape into his bag and leaves with Mr. Garrity.”
“I don’t have to take that,” Byrd growls. “The man jumped bail. He was a fugitive.”
“Please bear with me, Sheriff. You’ll get your chance to respond, I assure you. Yes, Dr. Cage did jump bail, but he did not flee the jurisdiction. In fact, he spent every day trying to track down members of the Double Eagle group, whom he believed to be responsible for Viola Turner’s death. Further, he eventually attended the public funeral of Henry Sexton—the man who provided Viola the tape in the first place—and then turned himself in to the FBI. And all the while that videotape was in his van. Do those sound like the actions of a guilty man?”
“Hell, yes. He was a fugitive on a murder warrant.”
“On a charge that never should have been made.”
“Objection,” Shad interjects. “Badgering the witness.”
“Sustained.”
“If the doc was innocent, why did he erase the tape?” Byrd demands.
“We have no evidence that he did that,” Quentin says with conclusive authority. “Moreover, you just testified that the tape sat in an unattended van for, what? At least two days? Possibly three?”
Sheriff Byrd isn’t used to this kind of treatment in a courtroom. “This is ridiculous,” he says angrily.
“Further,” Quentin goes on, “since the tape is blank, the only indication we have of what might have been on it comes from the testimony of Cora Revels.”
“So?” Byrd violently turns up his palms as though weary of dealing with a fool.
Quentin answers with a lazy cadence that easily blunts Byrd’s anger and frustration. “So the veracity of her statements depends totally upon her credibility as a witness. And I will be returning to that subject in greater detail later.”
Billy Byrd looks at the prosecution table and swallows. Shadrach Johnson offers him no help.
“Sheriff Byrd,” Quentin says in the tone of a regretful headmaster to a student, “I have been told that prior to this case, relations between you and Dr. Cage were not exactly friendly.”
Byrd’s porcine eyes snap back to Quentin. “We spoke when we passed.”
“That’s not what my client told me. In fact, after learning the history between you two, I’ve had to ask myself whether, given the past friction between you, there’s any way you could deal impartially with him in this case.”
Shad could object here, but he doesn’t want the jury to spend a half hour listening to tales of Billy Byrd’s domestic abuse if he can avoid it. I’d like to see Quentin explore just that, but he doesn’t.
“For example,” he continues, “do you dislike Dr. Cage enough to have your men stage this deep-six incident over the Mississippi River in order to make Dr. Cage look guilty?”
Byrd’s face goes dark with blood. “I don’t have to sit here and listen to that!”
“I’m afraid you do, Sheriff. You’re no more immune to the judicial process than Dr. Cage or myself, or even Judge Elder. And at this point, I have to ask the simplest question of all: Was that tape ever in the bedside table of that sickroom in the first place, as Cora Revels suggested? And if so, was there ever really anything on it?”
Byrd’s enraged eyes narrow. “You’re trying to get me all turned around!”
“On the contrary, Sheriff. I’m trying to strip away all conjecture and assumptions and leave only facts. And what we know is that, even if there was a tape in that bedside table, no one can say what happened to it. Certainly no one saw Dr. Cage remove any tape from that house.”
“Well, who else could have done it?”
At this point Quentin is turned in profile to me, and I see him smile. “That, Sheriff Byrd, is a very good question. One I think you should have been asking from the very beginning. But you didn’t feel that was necessary, did you? Lincoln Turner told you who his mother’s killer was, his suspect suited you just fine, and you never looked seriously at any other possibility.”
“But his prints were on the tape!”
“His fingerprints are on a tape, Sheriff. A blank tape. An erased tape that you say a deputy working surreptitiously for you supposedly discovered in an abandoned van.”
Sheriff Byrd shakes his head in impotent rage.
Quentin looks up as though about to ask another question, but then he simply says, “No further questions, Your Honor.”
As Quentin rolls back to the defense table, Sheriff Byrd growls, “You think you’re so damn smart. What about the other tape? Why don’t you ask me about that? Huh?”
Quentin’s face is toward me as the words leave Byrd’s mouth, and I see him lose a shade of color. Oh, no, I groan silently, bracing for the worst.
If Quentin doesn’t respond to Byrd’s parting shot, then Shad will happily lead Byrd wherever it is he wants to go on redirect. Except . . . Shad’s suddenly rigid posture tells me he might not be happy about Byrd’s little taunt.
“Your Honor,” Quentin says, turning his chair again, “in light of the witness’s outburst, may I continue my cross-examination?”