Chapter 2 - The Geometry of Booking
The precinct holding area was painted a institutional seafoam green designed in the 1970s to sedate violent men, though it mostly served to highlight the grease on the walls. Ryan sat on a welded steel bench, his knees pressed against his chest to stop the shivers that came with adrenaline withdrawal. Across from him, a kid with dye-bleached hair and a busted lip was sleeping soundly, mouth agape, indifferent to the fluorescents buzzing overhead like trapped hornets.
Every forty seconds, the elevator doors at the end of the corridor chimed. Ryan tracked the sound. He tried to construct a narrative where the cuts on Clara’s face were from a fallen picture frame, where the shattered glass by the sideboard was an accident involving the dog that had died two years prior. But his own bruised knuckles throbbed in time with his pulse, a dull, incontrovertible witness.
A civilian clerk with thick tortoiseshell glasses brought a tray: two slices of white bread wrapped in clingfilm with a slab of bologna between them. Ryan couldn't swallow. When they took his fingerprints, his thumb left a smudge that refused to hold clear ridges because his skin was clammy.
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"Sign here," the booking officer said, tapping a stylus against an LCD pad.
Ryan signed his name—the same neat cursive he had used on their mortgage documents four years ago when they bought the cape-style house on Elm Street. He felt like an impostor using that hand. That man owned lawnmowers and gave ten-dollar bills to neighborhood kids selling chocolate bars. This man wore a paper jumpsuit because his navy sweater had been bagged into an evidence vault.
