During the past three months, that lion of the law has not asked the State of Mississippi to provide any information about the case against my father. I only learned of this professional negligence from Caitlin’s sister, Miriam, just prior to her reporting it in the Natchez Examiner, and I nearly exploded when I did. Before I spoke to Quentin about it, I was certain he was going senile. After I talked to him, I wasn’t convinced I was wrong, but rather that he had some arcane strategy he was not going to share with me no matter how loudly I demanded it. My father clearly agreed with his strategy—which appeared to be legal suicide—and that left me no option but to consult a couple of older criminal lawyers in town about the matter. As it turned out, both recalled rare cases in which a defense attorney had declined to request discovery in order to conceal a surprise witness from the State. I can only hope that this method lies at the heart of Quentin’s apparent madness. If so, however, he has not confided it to me.

“. . . above the law!” Shad cries with startling vehemence.

These three words, uttered with an icy edge of indignation, break through my anxious reverie.

“That’s what we have here!” Shad declares, in the tone of a self-satisfied prosecutor headed home to the barn. “A privileged white physician who believed that nothing he did on that night would be questioned, much less raised against him as an accusation. Because, ladies and gentlemen, Dr. Tom Cage was not doing anything he had not done before, as you will see.”

There he goes again, I think, with a nightmare vision of former patients’ family members parading through the witness box with horrifying tales of unwanted euthanasia. Tom Cage as Dr. Kevorkian . . .

“This time, he was merely doing it for a different reason,” Shad says. “In this case, to silence a dying woman he had once claimed to love, and by so doing, to hide the fruits of his sin from the eyes of a world that had revered him for most of his life.”