Agent Calloway was the person who took the badge off Voss’s chest. She held out her hand and waited, and after a long pause, he unpinned it himself and put it in her palm.
“Sheriff Voss,” she said, “you’re free to go. But you’re not to have contact with any witness in this investigation, including Deputy Miller. Do you understand?”
Voss stared at Miller across booking, no longer furious. He looked like a man whose twelve years of unchecked power had been challenged by a twenty-five-year-old carrying a dollar notebook.
Then his gaze shifted toward me.
“You set me up,” he said. “You came into my county to set me up.”
“No, Sheriff,” I said. “I came into your county to pick up my aunt’s blood pressure pills and eat catfish. You set yourself up the minute you decided a Black woman in a denim jacket was someone you could hurt.”
