“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.