The Trespasser

by Tana French

instincts are good—not bragging: every D’s are, specially every D who makes it as far as Murder—and I know how to use them. They’ve come through for me when all the solid detective work in the world would have run me into a brick wall. But this time they’re being bugger-all use. Not that they’re out of commission—every sensor is firing wildly, red lights flashing, beeping noises everywhere—but they just keep sweeping, can’t pin anything down. Rory’s keeping something back, but I can’t tell whether it’s the murder or not; Breslin’s fucking with us, but I can’t figure out why. I feel like I’m missing the bleeding obvious here, but the harder I concentrate, the more all the signals turn to noise. Something is scrambling them. Another D, one with more experience than me, would be well able to do that. The other thing Ds are good at, as well as using their own instincts: wrecking other people’s. Suspects don’t make mistakes because they’re morons, or at least not all of them. They make mistakes because we know how to baffle them into it. Someone wants me to make a mistake. And I’m a couple hundred miles out to sea with all my systems going haywire. That doesn’t faze me too much, not in itself. Danger isn’t the thing scrambling my signals; it’s the only thing keeping me clearheaded enough that I have a chance of navigating my way out of this. I watch Steve, heading back between the desks with a brand-new blue folder sticking out from his handful of random paperwork, and I really...