“I’d like to remind the court,” Dad says, taking advantage of Shad’s distress, “that Henry Sexton’s hard-drive recording doesn’t show me at all. It only shows Viola dying, and in a way I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy. I can promise you this: if I had meant to kill Viola, whether out of anger or mercy, I’d have done a hell of a lot better job of it.”

Shad should sit down. When a witness gets away from you like this, you have to cut your losses and try to make it up elsewhere. In this case, Shad has only his closing argument left, but that’s better than pushing further into uncharted regions. And yet . . . I see almost limitless anger in Shad’s face as he grasps the magnitude of his error, and anger makes some lawyers reckless. He walks around the table with a pugnacious stride and stops just short of the witness box.

“Dr. Cage, before any legal action was taken against you, I called your son, the mayor, and asked him to find out what had happened at Cora Revels’s house that night. Yet you refused to tell your own son anything. Isn’t that true?”

“Yes. I had just learned that Lincoln Turner was my son. Penn hadn’t the first idea that I’d had an affair with Viola Turner, much less that he had a half brother. How was I supposed to tell him that, especially with the DA making noises about charging me with a crime?”

“An innocent man would have confided in someone.”

“Well . . . I didn’t.”

“Once you were arrested, why did you jump bail? Is that the act of an innocent man?”

Dad takes a deep breath and looks past Shad to the jury. “I didn’t believe the sheriff was interested in learning who had really killed Viola. He’d decided I was guilty on the first day, and he stopped looking for any other solution after that.”

“All the evidence pointed to you, Doctor.”

“There was other evidence,” Dad says doggedly. “But Sheriff Byrd didn’t care about that. He’d been looking to get even with me for twenty years, and with Viola’s death, he finally got his chance.”

“Why would the sheriff want to ‘get even’ with you, as you say?”

“Because I knew things about him.”

“What things?”

“Things he wouldn’t want to be made public. I can’t be more specific without breaking doctor-patient confidentiality.”

“You’ve been quite cavalier about breaking rules thus far. Why stick at a little talking out of school?”

“Subpoena the sheriff’s ex-wife. She’ll tell you what his problem was.”

“Did you have an affair with her as well?”

“Ob-jection,” Quentin says in lazy tone. “We’re getting mighty far afield of the issue before the bar, Your Honor.”

“Sustained. Mr. Johnson, you seem to be taking shots without aiming at this point.”