Dad shrugs noncommittally. “I’ll tell you something about death: it’s infinitely variable. A twenty-year-old Olympic athlete can trip over a curb and die instantly, and a ninety-year-old woman with three kinds of cancer can live to be a hundred.”

“Your point?”

“Drug interactions are unpredictable.”

His enigmatic tone makes me wonder if he’s caught in some transition stage between shock and grief. I should have recognized it immediately, based on my experience with murder victims’ families in Houston. But all that seems a long time ago now, and despite the nearness of Viola’s death, I need Dad to snap out of it. I need his self-preservation instinct to kick in.

“The DA isn’t thinking about drug interactions. He’s not even thinking about assisted suicide anymore. Shad intends to charge you with murder.”

After a brief grimace, Dad takes a brown bottle from his inside coat pocket and places a tiny white pill under his tongue.

“Is that nitro? You’re having angina now?”

He nods distractedly. “I’m fine. Go on.”

“I wish I could spare you this, but I can’t. At first I assumed that Shad’s idea of murder was you giving Viola the morphine injection, which is technically murder but much less serious than what we’re facing now. This afternoon Shad told me that he’s planning to charge you with first-degree murder. He won’t give me details, but he claims to have strong evidence of motive on your part—a motive for premeditated murder.”

Dad looks incredulous. “What kind of motive?”

“Shad believes you wanted to silence Viola before she could reveal some information you want kept secret.”

“That’s preposterous.”

“That’s the contention of Viola’s son.”

“Johnson wouldn’t tell you what this information was?”

I shake my head. Part of me wants to ask the brutally blunt question about Viola and my father, but for some reason I can’t bring myself to do it. Confronting him about a possible affair with Viola feels like challenging Dwight Eisenhower about his wartime mistress.

“Dad,” I say instead, “I have something on Shad that would destroy his legal career, and he knows it. He wouldn’t risk moving against you unless he felt he had no other choice. Whatever Lincoln Turner told Shad, or showed him, Shad genuinely believes it was a motive for murder.”

My father ponders this revelation like a monk parsing contradictory passages in the Bible.

“Given what I just told you, is there anything you want to tell me now?”

He grunts and shifts position like a man with upper back pain. “No.”

Leaning forward, I speak with all the conviction I can muster. “There is nothing you could tell me today that would alter my opinion of you, or make me judge you. Nothing. You understand?”

He closes his eyes for a moment. “Are you so sure?”