Free A Winsome Murder by James DeVita Page A

investigation and he’d known the victim and her family.
    â€œI’ll send you everything I’ve got,” Mangan told him. “Our forensic reports should be coming in soon, and I’ll get them up to you. We’ll keep following up on things here. If I find anything, I’ll contact you.”
    â€œThank you” Faber said. “I’ll fax what we’ve got to your medical examiner. You have his number handy?”
    Mangan gave him Rhys’s fax number and wished him luck.
    Why the severed hand of a murder victim from Wisconsin had been dropped off at Kevin Lachlan’s apartment in Chicago was still a mystery to Mangan, but at least he had a corpse now, or rather Wesley Faber had one. It would be Faber’s investigation now and off Mangan’s plate, which was just fine with him. He had more than his share of open cases to keep him busy. He wondered, though, why he’d misread the case. The feelings had been so strong when he’d heard the words, And whohas cut those pretty fingers off ? That usually meant he was in for the long haul. But then again, occasionally his instincts were wrong.
    Mangan completed the paperwork, filed it, and finished out the day reviewing his next case: the killing of a Sally-Boy Hicks, a heroin dealer in K-Town shot twice in the back of the head and tossed off a fifteen-story building. Redundant, Mangan thought, but obviously somebody was trying to make a point. After work he stopped off at the Melrose Diner and got dinner to go, eating most of it on the drive home. He headed up Lake Shore Drive, hitting the usual traffic, and continued north to Rogers Park.
    The four-story townhouse where Mangan lived, built in 1920, still had a vintage charm to it, a phrase most often used to camouflage the more dilapidated shitholes in Chicago, but this building was actually in pretty good shape. He’d moved there not long after his wife died and had lived on the fourth floor, apartment 421, for three years now.
    He pulled into his absurdly expensive parking space around back and grabbed what was left of his dinner. Built onto the rear side of the building was a tall zigzagging run of wooden stairs leading nearly to the roof. The stairs opened out onto landings off the back of each apartment’s kitchen entrance. Pretty much everyone used these stairs as the main entrance to the building since the parking was out back. Mangan made his way up the wooden stairway—his exercise for the day—keyed open his back door, and walked into the kitchen. Quiet and dark. He kept his thick window curtains closed during the day. A room at the front of the apartment had a bay window that jutted out slightly from the building. If he stood at just the right angle, Mangan could spy a little piece of Lake Michigan at the far end of the street.
    It was not a small apartment but one of those spaces where the square footage was three times as long as it was wide, like living in a skinny rectangle. There were two large guest rooms off a long hard-wood-floored hallway that led from the back kitchen to the front room. There were no beds or dressers in these rooms, only a single chair in each, a short stepladder, and books—hundreds of books—shelved on every wall. There were books piled on the floors against the walls and stacked in the closets. Out in the long hallway, shelves had been built, floor to ceiling along both sides. They too, were filled with books. In the living room there was a couch and a large coffee table with books strewnon and around them and piled everywhere that there was space enough to do so. This was the other part of Mangan’s world. Books. They were his Yale and Harvard. They cracked the quiet of an otherwise empty home, and he never had to feed them or take them for a walk.
    Mangan ate what was left of his dinner and poured himself a gin. He headed to the front room and called his daughter.
    â€œHey, Katie, it’s