The next morning, I walked the letters down the hall to Chief Judge Harold Brennan’s office. We made copies, logged everything, and he forwarded the originals to the United States Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of Georgia and to the public corruption squad at the FBI’s Atlanta field office. I wrote a memo stating that I had a family connection to Pell County, and that I would recuse myself from any case that came out of it.
I thought that would be the end of my part.
Then, three weeks ago, Aunt Lorraine fell and broke her hip.
I took a week of leave to drive down and stay with her during her recovery. I told Chief Judge Brennan where I’d be. He asked me, half joking, to keep my head down.
“Pell County isn’t Atlanta, Amara,” he said. “Be careful.”
I’d been there four days. That Tuesday, I left Aunt Lorraine napping with her physical therapist on the porch, drove into Halvorsen Springs to pick up her prescriptions at Pruitt’s Pharmacy, and stopped at the Magnolia Diner for lunch because I was hungry and they make good catfish.
I wasn’t wearing anything that would tell anyone I was a judge. I didn’t introduce myself. I didn’t flash my credentials. I sat down in a booth and ordered lunch, like the woman I was raised to be.
And twenty-two minutes later, Dalton Voss put me in handcuffs.
The ride to the station took six minutes. Voss drove with one wrist draped over the steering wheel, humming along to a country station. Every so often he glanced at me in the rearview mirror and smiled.
The young deputy sat in the passenger seat holding my purse in his lap. His name tag said MILLER. He couldn’t have been more than twenty-five. He kept stealing looks at me over his shoulder. He looked like he wanted to say something and didn’t dare.
“Run her name when we get in,” Voss told him. “And find out what she was doing in my county.”
