Flesh and Bone: A Body Farm Novel - By Jefferson Bass Page 0,97
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.”