Flesh and Bone: A Body Farm Novel bf-2

by Jefferson Bass

  Burt had had to explain the proceedings to me three times before I retained all the details. Detective Evers and Michael Donner, the Polk County DA who’d agreed to fill in for Bob Roper, had spent a brisk twenty minutes summarizing the evidence against me for the grand jury. On the basis of the surveillance video, the bloody sheets, and hair and fibers linking me to Jess Carter’s body, the grand jury had signed a “presentment,” which prompted the Knox County Criminal Court clerk to issue a capias for me. “What’s a capias?” I asked.

  “Legalese for arrest warrant,” he said. “You’ve heard the Latin phrase carpe diem, ‘seize the day’? Capias is a noun form, but it means ‘grab that sumbitch,’ bottom line.”

  “But they’re not coming after me with blue lights and handcuffs?”

  “They will,” he said, “if you make them. But I negotiated to drive you out to the booking facility in my car so you can turn yourself in with some semblance of dignity.”

  He had negotiated for more than that, as it turned out. DeVriess didn’t want me to have to walk in the front door of the detention center, as he figured there was a fair chance someone might leak the news to the media. Instead, he worked out a deal that would allow him to drive me into the booking facility’s “sally port,” a lower-level entrance with a big garage door, used by police cruisers and paddy wagons transporting prisoners to court and back. Normally only official vehicles were allowed in the sally port, but Grease persuaded Evers to let him drive me inside in his own car. Evers would meet us there and accompany us into the sally port in his unmarked Crown Vic, where I would be frisked, then taken inside and fingerprinted and booked. “Jesus,” I said, “fingerprinted like a common criminal.”

  “Trust me, Doc,” DeVriess had responded, “you’re being treated like a very uncommon criminal. This is what they call a high-profile booking, which means you’re getting the kid-glove treatment normally reserved for elected officials and old-money millionaires.” He’d paused. “Speaking of money, Doc, we need to arrange for your bond.” My bail had been set at $500,000, a sum that had made me gasp.

  “Hell, I don’t have that kind of money,” I’d said. “If I sold my house and my truck and what little stock I own, I’m not sure I’d have it.”

  “It’s okay. That’s why God created bail bondsmen.” For the low, low price of $50,000-a sum that would drain all my reserves and still tap my credit to its limits-a bail bondsman would post the required 10 percent of the bail. “The bondsman will need to put a lien on your property,” DeVriess had added, “just in case you skip town and leave him on the hook for the other $450,000.”

  “I had no idea being a criminal was so damn expensive,” I said. “You need to be rich to be a murderer.”

  “Not to be a murderer,” he corrected. “Just to beat the rap.”

  When I reached DeVriess’s office, his receptionist, Chloe, greeted me with a sunny smile, as if I were here to set up educational trust funds for my grandsons. “Hello, Dr. Brockton. Nice to see you again,” she said. “I’ll tell Mr. DeVriess you’re here. Can I get you some coffee or tea, or a soft drink?”

  “No, thank you,” I said. “I have to sign some ruinous paperwork, but then I think we’re gonna saddle up and move out.”

  Chloe smiled. “One for the road?” I shook my head, and she pressed an intercom button on her phone. “Mr. DeVriess? Dr. Brockton is here…I did, but he turned me down.” She looked up at me and winked. “He seems itchy to saddle up and move out…All right, I’ll bring him.”

  Chloe led me back to DeVriess’s office. “Thanks, Chloe,” he said, coming around the glass desk to shake my hand. Twenty grand bought a lot of courtesy, it seemed. “Bill, have a seat.” I sat. “Let me go over the bonding agreement, and tell you what to expect out at the detention facility,” he said. I found it hard to focus on the details of my financial destruction and impending arrest, but when he slid papers across the desk at me, I signed on the lines indicated by the cheerily colored tabs labeled SIGN HERE. After I had signed over all my assets, and perhaps my immortal soul, DeVriess said, “Okay, unless there’s something I haven’t covered, we should probably saddle up now.” He smiled to make sure I noticed the echo of my words. I tried to smile back, to show him I appreciated the effort, but a grimace was as close as I could get. He dialed a number on his phone and said, “Detective? Burt DeVriess. We’re heading out now. We’ll see you out at the detention center.”

  We descended in silence to his car, which was parked directly beside the elevator. “I’ll bet I’m the first Knox County prisoner ever delivered in a Bentley,” I said as I opened the door. We left downtown on the James White Parkway, then bore east on I-40 to the 640 bypass, where we backtracked north and west a couple of miles. We got off 640 onto Washington Pike and angled northeast for maybe five miles. This corner of Knox County had been farm country for most of my twenty-five years in Knoxville, but I noticed that even here, condos and subdivisions were sprouting like fungus amid the weathered farm houses.

  DeVriess slowed and signaled a left, and we turned onto Maloneyville Road and threaded a small pocket of ranch houses. Then we came to an S-curve, and the road wound down into a wide valley. On the right, behind a fence of chain link and barbed wire, stood the old Knox County Penal Farm, a barracks of ancient concrete with a rusting tin roof and a square brick smokestack. Ahead-below and to our left-sprawled a new golf course and, just beyond it, a huge, multiwing complex. There were no guard towers, and there wasn’t a perimeter of high razor wire, yet it was unmistakably a correctional facility. Confronted with the grim, tangible reality of it, I felt my stomach clench. “Jesus, I had no idea it was so big,” I said. “How many prisoners are in there?”

  “Right now? No idea,” said DeVriess. “The capacity is 667. Any more than that, they’re violating a federal cap. See that new cell block they’re building right beside the golf course? That’ll bring the maximum to nearly a thousand.” He sounded sad as he said it. I glanced at him and he looked thoughtful, a word I had never associated with Burt DeVriess. “Did you know, Doc, that two million Americans are behind bars right now? Biggest prison population on earth.” I did not know that. “We also have the highest incarceration rate of any nation. Six times higher than China, a place we like to believe is far more oppressive than we are.”

  “You sure about that statistic, Burt?”

  “I study this stuff the way you study teeth and bones, Doc. The US of A is home to only five percent of the world’s population, but one-quarter of the world’s prisoners. Something’s wrong with that.”

  He was right, though I didn’t know precisely how. “Well, let’s hope you can keep me from becoming prisoner number two million and one.”

  The main entrance was a large driveway to our left, marked by a seven-pointed star on a grassy embankment. The star was eight or ten feet across, labeled KNOX COUNTY SHERIFF. DeVriess continued past the driveway, past the main building, and turned behind a smaller building, a two-story barracks set inside a high fence. A basketball court was tucked into the angle formed by the L-shaped building. Just beyond this building, we bore left onto a one-lane driveway which circled back toward the central complex. The building’s main entrance was actually at the front of the second floor; we were heading for a large garage door notched into the ground floor, almost like a basement garage. An unmarked Crown Victoria sat idling to one side. When DeVriess approached in the Bentley, the Crown Vic pulled up to a speaker and John Evers leaned out and spoke as if he were ordering fast food in a drive-through lane. With a thunk and a whir, the big garage door began rolling upward. Evers edged forward, into the dark opening, and DeVriess followed, practically on his bumper. When both cars were inside, the door whirred and clunked down again.

  Three uniformed officers stepped from a curb to our right. One walked around to meet Detective Evers as he emerged from his car; the other two positioned themselves beside my door. Evers handed over a form-the capias, I guessed-to the officer I assumed was in charge,
and then motioned to me to get out. As DeVriess and I opened our doors and got out of the Bentley, the two deputies stepped to either side of me, each grasping an arm. DeVriess started around the front of the car, saying, “Hey, hey, that is not called for. You take your hands off of my client.” The two officers responded by tightening their grips.

  Their supervisor hustled around and laid his palm on Burt’s chest none too gently. “You listen up,” he barked, “this is our facility. Our rules. We are extending every possible courtesy to Dr. Brockton, but he has been charged with murder, and we will not risk the safety of our officers. If he does not cooperate fully-if you do not cooperate fully-all deals are off, we put him in restraints and stripes, and we treat him exactly like every other prisoner. Is that clear?”

  “Burt, it’s okay,” I said. “They’re doing their job, and they’re doing it right. This isn’t a battle we need to fight.” DeVriess looked unhappy, but he nodded and kept quiet, and the officers relaxed their grips a bit.

  “Thank you, Dr. Brockton,” said the officer in charge. “I’m Sergeant Andrews, by the way, the shift supervisor. We need you to step over here to this wall, please, so we can pat you down.” The deputies steered me toward the spot he had indicated. “Please place your hands against this blue safety pad, shoulder height, far apart.” I assumed the position I’d seen on television many times, and the deputies’ four hands gave me a thorough going-over. One of them removed the small leather case clipped to my belt; he looked surprised and a little sad when he saw what was inside. It was my consultant’s badge from the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation. I’d worn it partly as a gesture of vain pride, partly as a not-so-subtle message to the people booking me, and partly as a desperate effort to hang on to my sense of who I was and what I stood for in this world.

  Once they were sure I wasn’t carry ing any concealed weapons, Andrews told me to empty my pockets, remove my watch and belt, and take off my dress shirt, leaving me in my T-shirt. On a clear plastic bag labeled INMATE PROPERTY BAG, he wrote my name, date of birth, Social Security number, and the date and time. Then he listed every item, including my TBI badge, and sealed them in the bag with a self-adhesive strip along the bag’s top flap. Then he had me sign the bag to indicate that the inventory was right. Down below, I noticed another line where I would sign-presumably within an hour-when they gave me back my property and released me. In this part of the machine, at least, the wheels of justice appeared to be well-oiled cogs.

  I heard Andrews telling Evers and DeVriess to pull forward when the garage door ahead of Evers’s car was raised. But before that happened, I was escorted from the sally port and into the building’s interior through a glass door labeled INTAKE.

  The room was large, clean, and brightly lit by fluorescents. It was also equipped with at least three video cameras that I could see. I’d already noticed several on the roof of the facility as we approached-they swiveled, tracking our trajectory-another camera outside the sally port, and a couple inside the port. “Y’all sure have a lot of cameras,” I said to my escorts. “Must be quite a command post if you’ve got a monitor for every camera.”

  The deputies glanced at each other in surprise. Most prisoners didn’t engage in such conversation, I gathered. “Yes, sir,” said one, “it’s a pretty advanced system. Made by a company called Black Creek. We’ve got over two hundred cameras, so there’s no way to have separate monitors.” He pointed at the three cameras suspended from the ceiling of the main intake room. “Central Command has a touch-screen computer system that shows the position of every camera on every floor. All you do is touch the icon for the camera you want, and the video feed from that camera pops up on the screen.”

  I nodded. “Sounds smart. You archive the images on videotape, or on a big hard drive?”

  “A monster hard drive,” he said. “We brought this system online a month ago. We’ve saved every image from every camera since, and we’ve only used a fraction of the storage capacity so far.”

  “Well,” I said, “if I’d known I would be on so many cameras and archived for posterity, I’d have gotten a haircut this morning.”

  He laughed, but suddenly he seemed embarrassed, as if by joking about my arrest, I had reminded him why I had been arrested. “We need to go in here and take your picture and get your fingerprints,” he said, pointing to a small room off one corner of the intake area.

  Two technicians occupied the room. One instructed me to stand with my back to one wall-“Put your back against the X,” he said, “and look at that X on the opposite wall.” That X was fastened to the top of a camera which snapped a photo that soon appeared on a computer screen.

  “I don’t have to hold a sign with an inmate number on it?”

  “No, sir,” he said in a tone that implied I’d asked the dumbest question he’d heard in a long while. “Computer puts that in automatically now. Okay, now turn and face the X on that wall,” he said, pointing to my right. “And now turn and face the X on this wall.” And so, in a matter of seconds, I had mug shots on file.

  The other technician belonged to the guild of fingerprinters. It was a guild that had gone high-tech. The sheriff ’s intake facility had two computerized fingerprint scanners, labeled CROSS MATCH. The fingerprint technician had me lay the four fingers of my left hand on the scanner’s glass-a print he called a “four-finger slap,” then the four fingers of my right hand, then each thumb. Then he rolled each of my ten digits across the glass, some more than once, when the Cross Match computer informed him the print was unacceptable because of a “vertical gap.” After he’d printed all my fingers, he removed a black cover from a clear plastic cone located to the left of the flat glass plate. Through the plastic, under the wide base of the cone, I saw wires leading to a small black rectangle that was emitting green light. “What’s that?” I asked.

  “Palm scanner.” He had me wrap my palms around the cone, one hand at a time, the tip of the cone rising up between my thumb and forefinger. Beneath the cone, the scanning head-the rectangular box-rotated around a central axis as the green light brightened, illuminating the ridges of my palms. I thought I was finished then, but next he had me lay the edge of each hand on the cone-my “writer blades,” he called them.

  “That’s very thorough,” I said. “Now you send these off to the TBI and the FBI to see if I’m already in their criminal database?” He nodded. “My friend Art Bohanan says he can get an answer in an hour or less. Is that right?”

  “Oh, often in ten minutes or less,” he said, “at least from the TBI.”

  “The wonders of modern technology,” I said. “We done now?”

  He looked a little sheepish. “No, sir, not quite. We also have to do what’s called a ‘major crimes package’ on you, Doc.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “That means we have to break out Old Betsy here,” he said, pointing at a large and dusty wooden box that was shoved underneath the counter where the mug-shot computer sat.

  “What’s Old Betsy? You fixing to shoot me?”

  “Naw. Old Betsy is an old-fashioned ink-on-deck fingerprint kit. Besides the scans, we have to take ink impressions-slaps, rolls, tips, palms, writer blades, and wrists.”

  “How come? You’ve already scanned most of those. Anyhow, I thought the fingerprints were what really mattered.”

  “Funny thing,” he said. “A lot of criminals are really careful about not leaving prints from their fingertips. But they don’t think anything about the edge of their hand, or their wrist. These ink impressions will be sealed in an envelope and hand-delivered to the lead investigator. They’ll give the investigators and forensic techs more to look for at a major crime scene.”

  “Good thinking,” I said. “I just wish they knew where the crime scene was. Where Dr. Carter was murdered.” Suddenly he, too, looked uncomfortable. I seemed to be having that effect on people a lot these days. He didn’t say much as he took the prints in ink, and when he’d finished and handed me some moistened towele
ttes to clean my hands and wrists, he seemed relieved to turn me over to my next handler, a pleasant female clerk who asked a series of routine questions-my name, address, age, date of birth, Social Security number, some basic medical information, and the like-and typed in my answers in a clatter of keystrokes. She also transferred some information from the arrest warrant Detective Evers had handed over upon our arrival.

  As she typed, I noticed a fairly steady stream of uniformed personnel passing through the intake area, in ones and twos, with no apparent purpose. Finally it dawned on me that they were sightseeing, and that I was the sight they had come to see. The thought made me flush with a mix of humiliation and anger, but I did my best to act nonchalant. Eventually I started nodding and saying hello, and that seemed to even the scales: the sightseers, caught gawking, now looked as ashamed as I felt.

  After the intake clerk had finished her flurry of typing-producing more keystrokes, in less time, with fewer visible results, than anyone except maybe an airline ticketing agent-she looked up and smiled at me. “Okay, I think we’ve got it. I believe Sergeant Anderson will be here for you shortly. Would you mind having a seat in this room over here?” She indicated a small side room separate from the larger intake room. I pointed at the main room, where three prisoners in stripes lay sprawled on stainless steel benches.

  “You don’t want me where those other guys are?”

  “No, sir,” she said. “They told us you’re a ‘high-profile.’ That means you’re segregated from the other prisoners.” She gave me another smile, and it seemed genuine. Even here, in the seamy underbelly of society, there was a class system, and DeVriess had negotiated me into the upper crust.