“Between eight thirty and eight forty. I can’t be any more specific than that. I was between patients.”

“And where did you see him?”

“In the hallway on the first floor.”

“And how far was he from the room housing the MRI machine at that time?”

“Um . . . about sixty feet.”

I close my eyes and force myself to breathe deeply. As I exhale, I feel my mother’s hand grip mine. She’s not looking for comfort, I realize. She’s trying to comfort me.

“And what was Dr. Cage doing there?”

“I don’t know.”

“Did you speak to him?”

“Yes. I always speak to Dr. Cage. He always has a word for everybody.”

“And how did he seem on that day?”

Reed takes his time with this question. “About like any other day, I’d say.”

“He didn’t seem preoccupied?”

“Objection,” Quentin says. “Leading.”

“Sustained,” Judge Elder declares.

“Withdrawn. Mr. Reed, did Dr. Cage have patients anywhere in the area of the MRI unit?”

“Ah . . . not really, no. But Dr. Cage is the kind of doc who’s all over the hospital all the time. Old school, you know? Visiting techs and nurses, other people’s patients. You might find him fiddling with a microscope in the lab, helping the techs try to fix it.”

“So, in your experience, Dr. Cage was handy with technology?”

“Oh, yeah. A lot of doctors know medicine but don’t know anything about the technology that gives them the data to make their diagnoses. A lot of docs couldn’t shoot an X-ray if they had to.”

“But Dr. Cage is different?”

“Yes, sir. When it comes to lab tests, X-rays, surgical equipment, rehab stuff, he can tell you the way they did it in the Civil War, World War One, World War Two, and right on up to now.”

Shad is working hard to conceal his pleasure. Byron Reed doesn’t seem to understand that by his enthusiastic praise of my father, he is damning him further with every word.

“Thank you, Mr. Reed.”

Quentin declines to cross-examine Byron Reed, and Judge Elder releases him. Then Shad calls a man I do know to the stand, an X-ray technician named Gerald McGraw. Gerry McGraw is about sixty, with a bald head and a salt-and-pepper beard. A Vietnam vet, the X-ray tech has been a friend of my father’s for years. As the clerk swears McGraw in, I realize exactly what Shad is doing. Having been deprived of the content of the videotapes, Shad means to demonstrate that Dad had both the opportunity and, more important, the technical know-how to erase them so thoroughly (and exotically, in the case of the Dumpster tape).