She looked at Naomi the way you look at a problem you've already solved.
"Sit her down," Crane said. "Let's make this quick."
They pushed Naomi into the metal chair at the center of the room. It was bolted to the floor. She registered that detail without reacting to it. She registered everything without reacting to it.
That was the only strategy available to her now, and she had understood it the moment the handcuffs closed. Not resistance, not argument, but witness. She would see everything. She would remember everything. She would use everything.
Voss dropped her briefcase onto the small table along the wall and flipped it open. He leafed through the contents with the casual disregard of someone who has never respected anything that didn't belong to him.
Legal pads. Three case folders. A copy of the morning docket. Her mother's spare reading glasses in a soft case. A protein bar she hadn't eaten.
He picked up the docket sheet and read the case number aloud. "2024-CR-0318."
He turned it over, scanned the back, and tossed it down. He did not look at the defendant names printed clearly at the top of the page. He was not looking for information. He was performing a search, which is different.
"Paralegal," he said to no one in particular. "Or one of those court observers. You know the type. They get a visitor's badge one time, and suddenly they think they work here."
"I want to call my attorney," Naomi said.
"You'll get your phone call."
"I want to make it now."
Voss looked at her for a moment, then reached into his pocket and set her phone on the table, face down, three feet from her cuffed hands.
"There it is," he said. "Whenever you're ready."
Pruitt laughed from the doorway. It was the loose, comfortable laugh of a man on familiar ground.
Crane pushed off the wall. "Voss. Let's move this along."
What happened next took four minutes. Naomi counted them in her head against the rhythm of the fluorescent lights blinking.
Voss retrieved the electric clippers from a duffel bag that had been sitting in the corner, already there, already waiting, and plugged them into the outlet beside the table. The buzz of the motor filled the small room like a third voice.
Pruitt moved behind the chair and placed both hands on Naomi's shoulders, pressing down. Not lightly. With intention.
She thought about her mother.
She thought about Gloria Ellison rising at 5:00 a.m. in the dark, pulling on her work uniform, checking the bus schedule.
She thought about the particular quality of her mother's dignity. Not the loud, demanding kind, but the deep, structural kind. The kind that comes from knowing exactly who you are when the world keeps insisting you are something less.