A Winsome Murder by James DeVita Page B

of your business.”
    â€œC’mon, give me details.”
    â€œI’m discreet. You know what that means?”
    â€œYeah, but it’s no fun.”
    â€œGo away.”
    A s soon as Coose stepped out of the room, a rush of words slammed into Mangan’s thoughts. They came at him like a gale. He grasped at them, trying to trammel up their meanings, but they flew by—too many, too fast—a wreckage of words hurled across his mind—and then they were gone.
    Just as quickly, nothing. He quieted himself and concentrated harder, willing them to return, trying to force them into showing themselves again.
    They wouldn’t come.
    So he ignored them.
    He knew their game. Sometimes, to hear the words more clearly, Mangan needed to listen less closely. The words that circled behind his mind’s eye sometimes behaved like diminutive stars that disappear when looked at too directly. But if one focuses on an area just slightly to the side of them, these shy stars will sometimes show themselves again. Murderers were like that, Mangan believed. In a case with a profound lack of evidence, if he focused on some larger thought, or on some seemingly innocuous piece of evidence, and not just on who committed the crime, sometimes a glimpse of the killer might appear.
    You had to come at murderers sideways.
    Mangan turned his thoughts to the Chicago case, the handless victim, wondering who she might be, wondering what her connection was to the Wisconsin murder. He had a hunch the Chicago victim was a prostitute. They frequently have no family to speak of and their bodies often go unclaimed. If there even was a body, that is. Coose could be right. It’s possible that this was a kidnapping—no, no, Mangan knew the woman was dead, whoever she was. He took a sip of coffee, as cold as it was shitty. He dumped it in the sink, watching the rust-brown liquid swirl into the drain—
    It will have blood, they say.
    There they were …
    Blood will have blood.
    They were back.
    See thy mangled daughter, sweet father.
    See thy mangled daughter … and cease your tears.
    The words came to him very clearly now. And he knew them. He’d just read them. “Thy mangled daughter” was a line was from Titus Andronicus . “Blood will have blood” was from Macbeth . Given his line of work, that play often spoke to him, or Shakespeare did, Mangan couldn’t really say who was doing the speaking. Of course he knew it wasn’t actually Shakespeare, he wasn’t crazy, but when he wondered about this phenomenon of his brain, and the mental gymnastics that often played out there, he had to consider the possibility of whether something larger than himself was at work, something that was trying to contribute to his thinking or lead him in a particular direction.
    Is it I, God, or who, that lifts this arm?
    Or were these just the foolish musings of his mind? Was he merely assigning a meaning to these obsessive thoughts of his?
    What is it, what nameless, inscrutable, unearthly thing is it?
    Or perhaps the nature of the mind was inherently larger than one’s own self, and if so, these thoughts might be part of a larger collective conscience, part of the deeper, faraway things in Mangan, the occasional flashings forth of the intuitive truth , as Melville said, for that author’s words were now tacking through his mind also. Or, if he were really honest with himself, this could actually be some mild form of insanity, a fluttering of the wings of madness. He entertained the thought … then scuttled it.
    There is a divinity that shapes our ends, rough hew them how we will.
    Mangan knew these works of literature so well that he couldn’t tell if it was merely his memory correlating poetry with evidence—a sort of involuntary associative leap—or if the poetry was actually guiding his thinking, helping him to draw conclusions from the evidence he’d gathered. He really