Flesh and Bone: A Body Farm Novel

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.