Chapter 5: Day Five

The Iroquois County coroner kept his dead in a deer locker behind the funeral home.

At 8:05 on Tuesday morning it held exactly one man.

I had made the drive from Chicago in an hour and fifty minutes, down I-57 through corn stubble.

Downstate there were no block clubs.

Truck militias did the shooting, farm families and VFW regulars with deer rifles, and the biggest was the Kankakee River Rangers.

They had a hundred and ten men and sixty trucks, and Del Vandergriff was their captain.

The coroner met me at the back door in a black suit and a Cubs cap.

He was seventy and elected, a funeral director first and a coroner second, and he did not own a scalpel.

"Downstate counties don't have pathologists," he said, loud over his hearing aid. "We have a doctor in Kankakee who reads x-rays, and we have me."

"And Directive 7," I said.

"And Directive 7. Now nobody has to look."

He led me down a ramp into the cold, where the hog farmer lay on a steel tray in a plastic sheet.

He was sixty-four, thick through the shoulders, with feed-store hands and a farmer's tan that stopped at his collar.

Four straight punctures sat in a row in his lower back, an inch apart, and the edges were clean.

"Same as Chicago," the coroner said.

"Same as Chicago. When did he die?"

"Thursday night, a little after eleven. This is day five."

I did the sum without wanting to.

Seven days from his death was next Thursday at 11:05, so I had two days and a bit.

"I need ten minutes alone with him," I said.

"Take twenty. Del Vandergriff said nine o'clock, and I'll keep him on the porch with coffee as long as my knees hold up."

When he had gone, I peeled off my right glove and laid my hand on the farmer's wrist.

[Carried: 3 hours. Capacity: 12.]

Then I was in a hog barn at five minutes after ten on Thursday night.

The farrowing house smelled of straw and ammonia, with a radio on the wall reading the hog prices.

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