“Good. You were a witness at the club, with seeing Wrayburn and the dece—your cousin—there. Then there’s your gun and your interesting connection to Jasper because of the drive-by. I’m pretty sure that everything that Biddy and Diamond told you about Jasper will be hearsay because they’re not here to testify. A good defense attorney will probably get that thrown out, but then I’m not a lawyer, so maybe I’m wrong. We’ll have to get with the AUSA, but we’ll definitely need you for all the other stuff when the grand jury investigation gets going.”

“Whatever it takes,” I say.

“But not in the shape you’re in,” Millhoff says.

Well, there’s only one way I know of to get back to the way I was—better.

“With all this shit going on, I know there’s no way certain officials didn’t get word. So why didn’t Jasper get suspended for the part-time?”

“We want him to feel safe. Lot of shit happening in that club.”

“He may be a good-for-nothing, but he’s not stupid enough to get caught up in illegal activity now,” I say.

“Well, he is working the club,” Hurley says. “His supervisors at 1D don’t give a shit. They’d have to suspend half the department for doing the same thing. So they let it go, and we don’t talk about it. We only deal with our command, and they let us do what we have to do to make a good case.”

“Remember the phrase they would pound into our heads at investigator school—‘Time is always on our side,’” Millhoff says.

I’m not that patient.

I change the subject ’cause I’m getting pissed off.

“What about Biddy? Was it a suicide?”

“Yes,” Millhoff says. “Nothing suspicious. No struggle. He’s the main reason we stopped by, though.”

“Go on.”

“You must have made a connection with him somehow, because before he committed suicide he gave a guard a message to relay to you.”

“What?”

“The only family he had left was his uncle, Robert Diamond, and Diamond’s son is out of the country. Probably would have asked a relative to tell you instead. But he had no one.”

Hurley pulls out a white piece of paper, a photocopy of someone’s handwritten notes on what looks like a pocket notebook.

“This is what the guard notebooked after Biddy told him that,” Hurley says, handing it over to me.

I read it.

I don’t like who I am right now. I want to apologize for breaking into your house and messing your life up.

“Guard said those may not have been his exact words,” Millhoff advises me.

“I don’t understand. Why would he say that?”

“Make amends, something like that,” Millhoff says.

“And the CO didn’t think that was a bit odd and maybe they should put a watch on him?”