Courthouse policy required judges to badge through at any public checkpoint they used. She had done it a dozen times before. It was a 30-second process.
Voss stepped directly into her path. "Random screening. Step to the side."
Naomi looked at him evenly.
She had been through enough courthouses, enough checkpoints, enough moments exactly like this one, to recognize what was happening. She had learned a long time ago that the fastest way through was often a straight line and a steady voice.
"Good morning," she said. "I'm Judge Ellison. I have credentials here."
She opened the badge case with one hand and held it toward him. Voss didn't look at it.
"I said step to the side, ma'am."
"I understand. I'm happy to comply with a secondary screening." She kept her voice level, professional. The tone she used when she was explaining something for what she knew would not be the last time. "I just want to show you my identification first, so..."
Pruitt appeared at her left shoulder. "There a problem here?"
"No problem," Voss said, already reaching past her to take the badge case from her hand. "Just a lady who doesn't know how to follow directions."
He turned the badge over in his fingers with the exaggerated skepticism of someone performing for an audience.
The lobby was filling now. Early morning lawyers, clerks, paralegals, defendants, and their families. All of them moving around this small collision the way water moves around a stone. Carefully, without making contact.
Fifteen feet away, near the visitors' information desk, a young woman in a gray blazer stopped walking.
Camille Ross was 24 years old and three months into a semester-long internship with a federal public defender's office. She had a law review article due on Friday and a 9:00 a.m. meeting with her supervising attorney on the sixth floor.
She recognized Judge Ellison immediately. She had appeared before her twice in her intern capacity and had spent an embarrassing amount of time reading about her appointment online.
Camille's hand moved toward her phone.
Then Pruitt's eyes swept the lobby in a slow arc. And the look on his face when his gaze passed over her was so deliberate, so precise, that her hand stopped moving and fell to her side.
She didn't leave. She stepped behind a column near the information desk and stayed very still.
"This badge could be anything," Voss announced, loud enough for the people nearest to him to hear. He was holding it up now, turning it as if examining it. "I've seen better fakes in a party supply store."
"That is a federal judicial credential," Naomi said. Her voice had not changed in temperature by a single degree. "The verification number is on the back. You can call the clerk's office directly."
"Ma'am, I'm going to need you to come with us."
"On what basis?"