Joe agreed. “Looks like we’ll have to make any door-knocking a little more formal.”

It took a couple of days to line up the needed warrants and manpower to approach Shaw’s Thomaston estate in the manner Joe had proposed, during which time they studied their target from every angle, including satellite imagery off the internet, to gain some insight into its topography. They also made sure to keep things discreet, not being keen on having someone local phone the homeowner.

They even took time to locate the Massachusetts architect of the compound’s primary structure and secure a copy of his floor plan. Not a standard precaution, perhaps, but one suggested by Willy after seeing how vast a place was Shaw’s home away from home.

The man trained to hunt humans was not comforted by what he saw.

“In military terms,” he told them on the day before their proposed visit, “it’s a defensive, possibly armored building, like a fort. It’s got the look of a country home, but built to hold off people like us, with exposed approaches, cross-fire zones, entanglement areas, and that’s without knowing how he’s rigged the inside. Looking at this”—he tapped the floor plan—“you might only think of a jacked-up version of your average family home, but I’m telling you, all I see are a series of positions designed and laid out to be defended room by room against an assault team.”

“We’re not going in with an assault team,” Joe pointed out.

“More’s the pity,” was the warning.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

The problem with Willy’s alarmist appraisal of Shaw’s country estate was that Joe knew his colleague to be naturally paranoid. That didn’t mean Willy was wrong about the building being built like a fortress, but no one could assure them that Lemuel Shaw was in residence. Staging a military-style attack on an empty building was not appealing.

Their approach, therefore, equipped with search and arrest warrants, was a nod to reasonable compromise. Joe and Willy drove up to the house along its long, twisting driveway, but with the ubiquitous Fred Houston and a backup tactical team positioned a half mile down the road.

The house was of staggering dimensions, in tune with what they were used to from Gilsum. There, the architecture had been extroverted—big windows, multiple decks, porches, and balconies, a sweeping vista of the valley at its feet. Here, while the construction material was also logs, the mood was utterly opposite. This was a hulking, Nordic, walled off, blank-faced monstrosity with few windows, no decking, zero view, and the aura of a wooden factory building straight out of Dickens.

In Willy’s wording, as they rounded the last forested corner and saw the place looming ahead, “Cozy.”

Joe stopped the car some three hundred feet from the traffic circle before the entrance. “It’s got a Hitlerian Wolf’s Lair look to it, don’t you think?”

“I do,” Willy agreed. “You notice the cameras and sensors on the way in?”

“I noticed some. I don’t have your eye for them.”