The Trespasser

by Tana French

Just got the hell out of Dodge.

it happens, good little citizens so petrified of getting in trouble that they act squirrelly as serial killers—or he helped her fall.

“Someone hit her in the face. She went over backwards, smacked her head on the fireplace.”

There’s been no struggle in here. She never got a chance to fight back.

“At least it’s murder. Here you were worried we’d been hauled out for someone’s granny who tripped over the cat.”

takes one long look at the victim’s face. It doesn’t make sense, not to civilians.

She’s somewhere under thirty. She was pretty, before someone decided to turn the left side of her jaw into a bloody purple lump; no stunner, but pretty enough, and she worked hard at it. She has on a truckload of makeup, the full works and done right; her nose and her chin would be little-girl cute, only they have that jutting look that comes with long-term low-level starvation. Her mouth—hanging open, showing small bleached teeth and clotted blood—is good: soft and full, with a droop to the bottom lip that looks witless now but was probably appealing yesterday. Under the three blended shades of eyeshadow her eyes are a slit open, staring up into a corner of the ceiling.

“Now that you’ve seen the place the way we found it, can we turn on the bloody lights and stop fucking about in the dark?”

No wonder she needed to make a restaurant meal into a major drama.

“Next time my ma asks me why I’m still single, I’m gonna tell her about this case. Or the last one. Or the one before that.”

“Come on. Someone just happened to walk in looking to kill her, at the exact moment when Rory was due to arrive for his beef Wellington? Seriously?”

most of them think we’re a bunch of prima donnas who should try doing some real solid work for a change—but they’re loyal as hell to Sophie.

Half my head is on where I’ve seen the vic before. My guard is down.

I’d rather brush my teeth with a chain saw than tip off Crowley.

Detectives Punch Shitty Excuse for Journalist in the Fucking Teeth.’”

that doesn’t explain how he’s finding out about my cases as soon as I do.

It gets to feel right on you, like the gun at your hip that leaves you lopsided when it’s not there. Some of the lads can’t put it down.

I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve caught myself in the half-second before I splattered temper everywhere and stuck myself cleaning up the mess for the rest of my life.

I know, dead certain, that someday soon neither of us is gonna catch me in time.

That’s the nearest I’ve ever been to falling in love.

Part of it was not having a dick, which apparently is the main thing you need to investigate murders.

they thought I had some cheek, swanning in like I had a right to be there, and I needed to be taught a lesson.

worn-out jokes starting Why is a woman like a, comments about me being on the rag, hints about how I had to be pretty good at whatever I’d done to get this gig—to

power. It was about deciding who would be the alpha dogs and who would be at the bottom of the pile.

If I learned one thing in school, it’s this: you never let them get you on the bottom of the pile. If you do, you might never get up again.

I’d rather shoot my own fingers off than go running to the gaffer whining for help.

I wasn’t going to roll over, belly up and wiggling and panting for whatever the big dogs wanted to do to me.

no one was going to turn it up too high while Costello had his eye on me. A few months later, Costello retired.

In school I had my mates. Anyone who messed with me was messing with them too, and none of us was the type you wanted to mess with.

I left my e-mail open on my computer, came back to everything wiped: inbox, sent box, contacts, gone.

but when I can’t do my job because nobody trusts me enough to go near me, then I start caring.

All of which is why Steve was the one ringing his contact for Lucy Riordan’s info.

“You know what it feels like? It feels like he’s sticking his tongue right out of the phone down your ear.” “And he’s positive it just made your day.”

On a good day I look good, and on a bad day you’d still notice me.

The stuff people think I should try to hide—being tall, being a woman, being half whatever—is the stuff I keep up front and in their faces. If they can’t handle it, I can use that.

I get a sudden nasty feeling like the trees behind us have snapped together and come down, with

a silent roar and a smash of branches, onto the spot where we

were p...

Lucy’s back is stiffening up. Nobody likes us knowing stuff they haven’t told us, but she’s liking it even less than most.

I’m pretty sure she’s just decided to lie to us.

“You think? I wasn’t telling her to have a loaded gun in her bra. Just to mind herself with a strange guy in her house. That’s paranoid?”

but Ash has this rule about not talking to a guy for too long—”

“Her mum died a few years back, her dad’s not around, she’s an only kid. Who else was she going to put?”

“Yeah.” But there’s a fraction of a second before it. Another brush past something Lucy isn’t telling us.

That affection warms her face again.

she should’ve been in therapy, or on medication. Or both.”

“That generation, you know? Everything was the woman’s fault somehow, and if you didn’t get how, then you probably needed to pray harder.

And Aislinn had to live there.”

Ash’s clothes were always wrong—she

the last thing you need is to look like some weirdo.”