Chapter 10: Return Box

Vandergriff Valley Hide & Salvage sat off Route 45 in Kankakee County, a long steel building behind a lot of Rangers' pickups.

Reiss had the right to walk into any licensed buyer's premises without notice, under a Bureau rule nobody had used in years.

He used it at ten on Thursday morning, with me beside him in the passenger seat as the examiner consulting on an Iroquois County homicide.

The front room was a pawn shop, and everything on its shelves had once been alive.

Glass cases held fold teeth at twelve dollars apiece, claws in sets of three at thirty, and vials of cloudy pearl extract on velvet.

Hides hung on racks behind the counter, gray-pink and welted, priced by the pound.

Behind a window with a Bureau seal, a clerk counted out cash to two men in camouflage.

They had brought in their tags, and the bounty was four hundred dollars a head.

The pearls themselves, nine hundred each, went through a steel door at the back with a keypad.

"Inspector! Doc!" Del Vandergriff came around the counter with his hands out and his cap in one of them. "I'd have baked a pie."

"Rule Fourteen audit, Mr. Vandergriff," Reiss said. "Every item recovered from a carcass, held ninety days, reported monthly to the Liaison."

"Whatever you need. We run a clean shop."

He walked us through it himself, and he was proud of it.

The scale room, the pearl vault and the wand room, where a tag crew's wands charged on a rack, each with a number.

At the back stood a gray steel cabinet the size of a refrigerator, with RULE 14 stenciled on the door.

Del unlocked it with a ring of keys, and swung it wide.

I had braced for something small.

There were shelves from floor to ceiling, and on every shelf sat clear bags, each with a paper label.

I saw a wedding band, a watch, a St. Christopher medal and a hospital band.

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