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investigated bank crimes, drug violations, kidnappings, and extortion. Serial killings, murder, sexual assault, and other crimes of violence, however, were given the highest priority.
    As Detective Mangan waited for his coffee, he sorted through a file of his open cases—two rapes, a North Side drive-by, a robbery gone bad with a baseball bat, and a dealer thrown off a roof in the projects— thank you, good morning. He fumbled with the teeny slivered clasp of a manila envelope, opened it, and slid out an eight-by-ten photograph of a dismembered hand.
    A new investigation.
    He tossed the photo on the table and went over to the half-sink, strewn with dirty plates and coffee cups caked with grime. He grabbed the least filthy cup he could find and cleaned it. He was sweating already. The air-conditioning had been out for two days now. He took off his two-button wool blazer, a jacket he was rarely without, even in summer. It hid his gun well and made him look as if he was in better shape than he actually was. It also obscured the extra flesh beginning to muffin out around his waist, a thing that mortified him. He’d complained about it so much that Dr. Brian Rhys, the forensic pathologist, had recently dropped a Men’s Health article on his desk: “101 Ways to Lose Your Gut.” Mangan was going to wrap a dead salmon in it and put it in Rhys’s car, but on second thought he decided to give it a try. He quit after number two: “avoid foods that come in a bag or box.” He was lazier now, and he knew it. He didn’t like working out anymore, didn’t like running or stepping on a scale, or having to watch what he ate, and hated that his doctor had made him quit smoking. He wanted his other body back, the maintenance-free one of his youth, the one like aluminum siding that he only had to hose down once in a while.
    The shitty coffeepot hissed and pissed to a finish. Mangan poured a cup and denied himself a third packet of sugar—as if that was going to make a difference—and looked more closely at the photograph of the bloodless hand on the table. He put his glasses on and read the prelim notes attached to the photo. The hand had been severed from the basilar joint of the left thumb on a clean diagonal across the wrist between the metacarpal and the trapezium bones. It is this joint, where the metacarpal bone of the thumb attaches to the trapezium bone of the wrist, thatallows movement of the thumb into the palm, or opposition , a motion that distinguishes human beings from most beasts, as Rhys liked to say.
    Mangan sipped his coffee and read on.
    A small-toothed serrated blade had been used to sever the hand, no trace under the fingernails, no signs of decomposition. A female appendage. A ring still on the small finger. A five-leafed clover inlaid with a greenish stone, malachite. Detailed forensic analysis was pending.
    Mangan wasn’t holding out much hope of finding a one-handed woman strolling along Lake Shore Drive. He knew whoever the hand belonged to was dead. The body would show up soon, though, he thought. It had been hot as hell in Chicago for weeks now, over ninety, somebody would nose her up in a few days. He read the remaining notes. The hand had been placed in an envelope addressed to a Mr. Kevin Lachlan, a magazine editor, and discovered within a box of submissions. There was no return address on the envelope. No postmark. A clerk at the front desk of the building had found the envelope in the lobby and had put it with Lachlan’s other mail. A note had also been found in the envelope, allegedly written by the perpetrator. Mangan took up a photocopy of it to give it a read, when a thought sounded in his mind—a question actually—a cadence of words singing quietly in his head.
    And who has cut those pretty fingers off ?
    â€œShit,” he muttered, taking off his glasses. He listened more closely.
    Thou hast no hands to wipe away thy tears.
    And he knew,