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 towelettes 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.
“Well, thank you for your kindness,” I said. “It’s good to know I’m a VIP among murder suspects. Just so you know, I really didn’t kill Dr. Carter.”
Now she, too, turned crimson and ducked her head.
I slunk to the bench and sat down. Within five minutes Sergeant Anderson appeared. “Dr. Brockton, your bond has been posted and we’re going to be releasing you from custody now. If you’ll follow me, we’ll step across the hall and get you going.”
An automated glass door at one side of the intake area slid open, leading to an elevator and a staircase. Beyond those, another door slid open before us, admitting us into an area labeled RELEASE. Release was virtually a mirror image of Intake except for the lack of the mug-shot and fingerprint stations. Another clerk at a computer desk-also a pleasant blond woman-handed over my possessions, along with a Sharpie marker. I used the Sharpie to sign the line at the bottom of the bag, indicating that all my property had been returned to me. It took some
