“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.”