“About seven weeks, in the physical sense. Emotionally, for much longer.”

“How did she end the relationship?”

“Painfully.” Dad closes his eyes briefly, like a man calling on deep reserves of fortitude. “Completely by chance, one of the men who had raped Viola was brought into our clinic for treatment. He had been seriously injured on the job.”

I feel my pulse start to pick up again.

“Who was that?” Quentin asks.

“Frank Knox. He was hurt while working at the Triton Battery plant. I was the contract physician for that company. Knox should have been taken to the hospital, but his coworkers brought him to me. In those days we did a lot more aggressive trauma treatment in the office.”

“What happened when Knox was brought in?”

“Viola initially refused to treat him. But she had always assisted me with trauma cases, so I insisted that she prep him. When I arrived in the surgery, however, I found Knox on the floor. His skin was blue and he was gasping for air.”

Every person in the courtroom is on the edge of his seat.

“What was Viola doing?” Quentin asks.

“Standing by the table, watching him die.”

“She wasn’t trying to treat him?”

“No.”

“What did you do?”

“I knelt and checked Knox’s airway, then tried to find the source of his difficulty. He’d suffered terrible trauma. A pallet of car batteries had fallen on him, rupturing his chest wall. But I sensed that wasn’t the source of his acute problem. I tried to get Viola to help me, but she refused. I actually got up and slapped her, but it did no good. When I asked why she wouldn’t help, she told me that Frank Knox and several other men had raped her two days prior.”

“Was that the first you’d heard of this rape?”

Dad’s face remains stonelike, except for a brief movement of his lips. “Yes.”

“What did you do then?”

“I asked why Knox was on the floor and in such bad shape. Viola told me she had injected air into a major vein. I could see the syringe she had used lying on the floor. A very large syringe.”

“Air. In a vein. What would be the result of such an act?”

“A bubble of air in a blood vessel won’t actually hurt you—not generally. But after questioning Viola, I learned that she’d injected Knox a total of three times. Probably two hundred cc’s of air, maybe more. An air embolus of that size would kill the patient when it reached his heart. Knox probably couldn’t have been saved even if he’d been in an urban trauma center.”

“Nevertheless, did you do what you could to try to save him?”

Dad looks directly at the jury. “No.”