Jefferson Bass - Flesh and Bone - A Body Farm Novel

“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.