“Let’s go back to the night Viola Turner died,” Shad says, rising from his table and looking hard at my father. “Not your fantasies, just provable facts. We know that you were at Cora Revels’s house that night. We know you were alone with the victim. You have admitted injecting morphine into her. We know that you always carry adrenaline in your ‘black bag,’ as you call it. We also know that when Cora Revels returned to her house, she found her sister dead. We have no evidence indicating that anyone else was in that house between the time you left and the time Cora Revels arrived. No witnesses to intruders, no forensic evidence that arouses suspicion of anyone else. Just the dead body of a woman whom you admit you went to that house to kill.”

“Another soliloquy, Your Honor?” Quentin asks in a seemingly bored voice.

“Get to your question, Counselor,” Judge Elder admonishes.

Shad’s jaw tightens, but he focuses his anger on Dad. “On the hard-drive recording of the victim’s death, she cried out your name. Can you explain that?”

“I was her physician. I had been coming to the house almost every night for weeks. I was her former lover. I think it’s natural that she would call out to me in a moment of terror and pain. Her mother was dead. Her son was far away, at least in her mind—”

“Don’t try to change the subject, Doctor. Did you always take your medical bag with you when you visited Cora Revels’s house?”

“Not always. I kept some supplies at her house.”

“But you took it with you on that night.”

“Yes. Obviously that night was different from any other.”

“Because you intended to kill your patient.”

“To help her commit suicide,” Dad clarifies.

“Was there any adrenaline in Cora Revels’s house?”

“Not that I knew of. Viola had signed a Do Not Resuscitate order, so I didn’t keep any there.”

“Have you ever given any patient a lethal injection of drugs, Dr. Cage? I’m talking about during the usual practice of medicine, not in wartime.”

There are only two acceptable answers to this question: “No” and “I decline to answer on the grounds that it may incriminate me.” But my father says, “On very rare occasions, I have.”

This unexpected gift stuns Shad speechless for a moment. “What occasions would those be?”

Dad takes his time with this, and he addresses the jury, not Shad, when he speaks. “When the line between agony and consciousness disappeared. When pain and terror could no longer be controlled. That doesn’t often happen, but when it does . . . it’s an awful thing to witness. I have hastened the death of a few patients in those dire circumstances, usually only by a few hours. A day or two, at most.”

“Are you aware that is a crime, Doctor?”