5

The minute after I arrest Jacob Hunt, all hell breaks loose. His mother cries out and starts shouting at the same moment that I put my hand on Jacob’s shoulder to lead him back to the room where we do our fingerprints and mug shots-but from his reaction, you would have thought I’d just run him through with a sword. He takes a swing at me, which sets off his lawyer, who-being a lawyer-is no doubt already wondering how to keep his client from being charged for assault on an officer as well. “Jacob!” his mother shrieks, and then she grabs my arm. “Don’t touch him. He doesn’t like to be touched.”

I gingerly test my jaw where he’s decked me. “Yeah, well, I don’t like to be punched,” I mutter, and I twist Jacob’s arms behind his back and handcuff him. “I need to type up some paperwork for your son. Then we’ll drive him down to the courthouse for his arraignment.”

“He can’t handle all this,” Emma argues. “At least let me stay with him, so that he knows it’s going to be all right-”

“You can’t,” I say flatly.

“You wouldn’t interrogate someone deaf without an interpreter!”

“With all due respect, ma’am, your son isn’t deaf.” I meet her gaze. “If you don’t leave, I’m going to arrest you as well.”

“Emma,” the lawyer murmurs, taking her arm.

“Let go of me,” she says, shaking him off. She takes a step toward her flailing son, but one of the other officers stops her.

“Get them out of here,” I order as I start to drag Jacob down the hall to the processing room.

It’s like trying to wrestle a bull into the backseat of a car. “Look,” I say, “you just have to relax.” But he is still struggling against my hold when I finally shove him into the small space. There’s a fingerprinting machine in there, plus the camera we use for mug shots, expensive equipment that in my mind’s eye I’m seeing shattered by Jacob’s tantrum. “Stand here,” I say, pointing to a white line on the floor. “Look at the camera.”

Jacob lifts up his face and closes his eyes.

“Open them,” I say.

He does-and rolls them toward the ceiling. After a minute, I take the damn picture anyway, and then his profile shots.

It’s when he’s turned to his right that he notices the fingerprint machine and goes very still. “Is that a LiveScan?” Jacob murmurs, the first coherent words he’s said since I placed him under arrest.

“Yup.” I stand at the keypad and suddenly realize that there is a much easier way to go about processing Jacob. “You want to see how it works?”

It’s like a switch has been flipped; the crazed tornado has morphed into a curious kid. He takes a step closer. “They’re digital files, right?”

“Yeah.” I type Jacob’s name onto the keypad. “What’s your middle initial?”

“B.”

“Date of birth?”

“December twenty-first, 1991,” he says.

“You wouldn’t happen to know your social security-”

He rattles off a string of numbers, looking over my shoulder at the next entry. “Weight: 185 pounds,” Jacob says, growing more animated. “Occupation: Student. Place of Birth: Burlington, Vermont.”

I reach for a bottle of Corn Huskers lotion that we use to make sure the ridges are slightly damp and all friction skin is captured and realize Jacob’s hands are still cuffed behind him. “I’d like to show you how this machine operates,” I say slowly, “but I can’t do it if you’re in handcuffs.”

“Right. I understand,” Jacob says, but he’s staring at the screen on the LiveScan machine, and I think if I’d told him that he’d have to give up one of his limbs in return for seeing the scan in action, he would have eagerly agreed. I unlock the cuffs and wipe his fingertips down with the lotion before taking his right hand in mine.

“First we do the thumb flats,” I say, pressing Jacob’s down one at a time. “Then we do flats of the fingers.” It’s a simultaneous impression, the four fingers of each hand pressed on the glass surface at once. “Once the computer’s got these loaded, the other images are matched up against them. You roll side to side, thumbs inward, fingers outward,” I say, illustrating with the first of his fingers and following through with the rest.

When the machine rejects one of the rolled fingers, Jacob’s eyebrows shoot up. “That is remarkable,” he says. “It won’t enter a shoddy print?”

“Nope. It lets me know when I’ve lifted the finger too soon or if the print is too dark, so I can redo the scan.” When I finish with his fingers, I press his palm flat on the surface-it’s the type of print we find most often on windows, if a criminal’s been peeking inside-and then I scan a writer’s palm print, the curved edge of the hand along the pinkie finger down to the wrist. By the time I switch to Jacob’s left hand, he’s practically doing it himself. “It’s that easy,” I say, as the images line up on the screen.

“So you’ll send out searches to AFIS right from here?” Jacob asks.

“That’s the plan.” Having a digital LiveScan that connects to the Automated Fingerprint Identification System is a godsend; I am old enough to remember when it was far more complicated than it is now. The prints are sent to the state central depository, which documents the arrest and sends it along to the FBI. After I lock Jacob up, I will come back to see if there are any other crimes in his past for which he has a record.

I’m guessing there will not be any other hits, but that doesn’t mean this is the first time Jacob’s acted out. It only means it’s the first time he’s been caught.

The printer spits out a card that I’ll put in his arrest folder, along with his mug shots. At the top, all of Jacob’s biographical information is listed. Below are ten small squares, each with a rolled print. Under those are the ten fingertip digits, lined up like an army of soldiers.

In that instant, I happen to notice Jacob’s face. His eyes are shining; his mouth is bent into a smile. He’s been arrested for murder, yet he’s on cloud nine, because he’s gotten to see a LiveScan system up close and personal.

I hit a button, and a second card is printed. “Here.” I hand it to him.

He starts to bounce on the balls of his feet. “You mean… I can keep it?”

“Why the hell not,” I say. While he’s entranced by the printout, I grasp his elbow to lead him to the lockup. This time, he doesn’t go ballistic when I touch him. He doesn’t even notice.

Once, I was called in to a suicide. The guy had OD’d on sleeping pills when he was supposed to be babysitting for his sister’s twins. The kids were ten-year-old boys, holy terrors. When they couldn’t wake up their uncle, they decided to horse around with him. They covered his face with whipped cream and put a cherry on his nose, which is the first thing I saw when I took a look at the body stretched out on the living room couch.

Those kids never realized the guy was dead.

Eventually, of course, they would have been told. And even though my work was done at that point, I thought about the twins a lot. You just know that after they found out, they were never quite the same. I was probably one of the last people to see those boys when they were still just two kids, when death was the farthest thing from their minds.

That’s what haunts me at night. Not the dead bodies I find, but the live ones I leave in my wake.

When I lock Jacob inside our holding cell, he doesn’t react-and that scares me more than his earlier outburst. “I’m coming back for you,” I say. “I just have to finish doing a little paperwork, and then we’ll go to the courthouse. Okay?”

He doesn’t answer. In his right hand, he clutches the fingerprint card. His left hand is flapping against his thigh.

“Why don’t you sit down?” I say.

Instead of taking a seat on the bunk, Jacob immediately sinks down onto the concrete floor.