“You started to inject the morphine,” Shad says, moving closer to the witness box, “the morphine Viola wanted. But as you depressed the plunger, she saw something alien in your eyes. Something only an old lover would see. You meant to kill her, all right, but not out of mercy. You meant to silence her forever, so that the sins she wanted to get off her chest would never see the light of day. And that’s when you botched the injection. Maybe she struggled, or maybe you just lost your nerve. Either way, most of the lethal dose went astray, into her muscle tissue.”

Shad pushes on breathlessly, unable to do anything but play out the scenario running so vividly through his mind. The terrifying thing is, something tells me he might not be far from the truth.

“Now, you’re in trouble,” he postulates. “Viola’s sedated, but not for long. Her sister’s only fifty yards away, at a neighbor’s house. Your illegitimate son is at a motel in town—”

“I didn’t know that,” Dad protests, but Shad plows on like a fever-blind horse.

“You open your black bag in the hope of finding some answer to your problem . . . and that’s when you see the adrenaline.”

Shad steps even closer to my father, who has gone very still. The image hurls me back to my eighteenth year, when Dad was being sued for malpractice. The lawyer who cross-examined him after months of depositions moved in just as Shad is doing, and on the night of that cross, my father had his first heart attack.

“You know a large dose will overload her weak heart,” Shad pushes on, “and if anyone raises questions”—he flips up his fingers like a magician after making something disappear—“you can say you made a failed attempt to resuscitate her. Under normal circumstances, of course, no one would raise any questions. After all . . . you’re Tom Cage. You’ve ‘helped’ patients into the hereafter before, and no one ever questioned you.”

Dad now refuses to look Shad in the face. Disgust is written deeply in his features, in the very angle of his head.

“You cross over to the camcorder and take out the tape,” Shad continues, “to make absolutely sure there’s no record of your final injection. Only you missed something. There’s a hard drive attached to that video camera, set to take over when the tape runs out. Unaware of this, you go back to the sickbed and inject Viola with an overdose of adrenaline. Then you step back into the shadows.