“Because as of this afternoon, what I’ve got is a man entering his own house, which he is entitled to do, at an hour he’s entitled to do it, wearing a hat.” Ruiz turned the legal pad around and started drawing boxes on it, which he did for the next twenty minutes and which I found unaccountably steadying.

“You saw a syringe.

Did you see a needle?”

“No.”

“Could you swear, on a stand, under cross, that the object in his hand was a syringe and not a pen light, a vape, a pill bottle, a torch?”

I sat with that.

“No,” I said.

“I could swear it was cylindrical and about that long.”