"You match a description."
"A description of what?"
Voss looked at her for a long moment, and something behind his eyes shifted. Not into doubt, but into something harder than doubt. The decision had already been made. The reason was just paperwork.
"Someone who doesn't belong here," he said.
The handcuffs came off his belt before she could respond.
At the elevator bank, Thomas Avery, Naomi's courtroom clerk, 15 years of service, a man who had survived four judges and two major courthouse renovations, stepped out of the elevator with a stack of manila folders under his arm. He was scanning his phone for messages.
He looked up at the sound of metal clicking.
He saw Naomi's wrists being pulled behind her back. He saw the briefcase, her briefcase, with today's hearing files inside, shoved aside on the conveyor belt.
He took one step forward. And Pruitt turned and looked at him with the flat, unhurried expression of a man who has stopped people in their tracks many times and never once been wrong about his ability to do it again.
Thomas Avery stopped walking. His folders bent in his grip as his hands tightened involuntarily.
Naomi was already being walked toward the back corridor. She didn't turn around. She didn't call out. She simply moved with them, steady, deliberate, her eyes scanning every face she passed with the quiet, methodical attention of a woman who was already building her case.
Behind the information column, Camille Ross watched until they disappeared through the door marked "Security Personnel Only."
Then she looked down at her phone. And this time, her hand didn't stop.
The room had a drain in the floor.
Naomi noticed it immediately. A small, circular iron grate set into the concrete, slightly off center. The kind of detail that told you everything you needed to know about what kind of room this was, and what kind of things had been cleaned out of it.
The walls were bare, poured concrete, unmarked except for a long scrape along the left side, where something heavy had once been dragged. A single fluorescent tube buzzed overhead, blinking faintly at the edges of its cycle. The air smelled of cleaning chemicals and old coffee and something underneath both that she couldn't name.
Lieutenant Barbara Crane was already there.
That was the first thing that told Naomi this was not random. Random didn't arrange itself in advance. Random didn't send a senior officer ahead to manage the room before the incident even arrived.
Crane was 51 years old, 23 years in the department, and she wore her authority the way some women wear pearls. As if she had been born with it on and had simply never taken it off.
She was leaning against the far wall with her arms crossed and her face arranged into an expression of mild inconvenience. The face of a woman who had been called away from something more important and was choosing to be gracious about it.