Shepherd crossed the room and pulled the phone receiver from its cradle. He held it to his ear for a moment, heard the dead line, and set it back down. He looked at Naomi with the expression of a man watching someone else play a bluff he considers obvious. Activate the task force, he repeated. His voice doing a version of her tone.
Atlanta field office. Very official. He shook his head. Lady, whoever you just called, they're not coming. And even if they do, all they're going to find is a woman who had a very bad afternoon because she decided to make things hard for herself.
Naomi looked at him for a long moment. "You should have spent more time looking at the name on that license." She said simply. He walked her to a holding cell at the back of the building. Small concrete room, metal bench along one wall, a narrow window near the ceiling that admitted a single strip of pale afternoon light.
He closed the door with a satisfaction of a man who believes he has settled something. Naomi sat down on the bench. She folded her hands in her lap. She thought through what she had observed in the past 2 hours with the methodical attention she brought to every evidence review. The language Shepherd used, the script that Slater had followed without hesitation, the way Dodd had accepted the arrest without asking a single clarifying question about probable cause, the way the booking process moved with the ease of something practiced.
None of this was improvised. None of this was individual. This was institutional. She sat. She waited.
At the booking counter, Obie Pruitt was entering her information into the system. He typed her last name, her first name, her date of birth. His fingers slowed. He opened a browser window. Typed Naomi Caldwell FBI.
The first result was a Department of Justice press release. The photo was a high-resolution official headshot, a woman in her early 50s, direct gaze, reading glasses pushed up on her forehead. The caption read, "Assistant Director Naomi Caldwell, FBI Civil Rights Division." Pruitt looked at the photograph. He looked at the booking form.
He looked at the hallway. The blood drained out of his face in one complete and absolute withdrawal, leaving him the color of the fluorescent light above him. "Sheriff," he said very quietly. Dodd looked out from his office. "What?"