Until Joe heard Willy calmly say, “Shit,” and freeze in place.

“What?” he asked.

“I missed one.” He pointed to something on a far baseboard Joe couldn’t even make out.

“Okay. We’re still here.”

“That’s the catch,” Willy explained. “We’re also not getting out without help. We triggered a safe-arming device. I heard it snap into place. If this is even close to what I would’ve done, it means our way in is now closed behind us.”

Joe stared at him. “I don’t understand.”

In another context, Willy’s response would have been short and acerbic. Now, he was patience personified. “All those traps we bypassed? I was hoping they were just to track our progress. This one, I think, is rigged to explosives. It’s like a master switch opening all the circuits in the house. If we go back, half of those we passed will now blow.”

Joe absorbed that before asking, “What d’you want to do?”

Willy held up his phone. “We’re now in a Cat A situation. We tell the others what we got and keep going. We don’t have much to lose.”

Joe was of two minds concerning that, but he was curious, too, about what might have been prepared for them—unless Lemuel Shaw routinely left the house like this, as other mortals simply lock the front door.

By now, he seriously doubted that.

Willy ordered up a hasty team on his phone, exceeding what they’d set in place down the road. In their vernacular, a “hasty team” was more than just tactically trained, forced-entry people. It included at least a couple of bomb techs—specialists trained by the FBI in Huntsville, Alabama, and, because of their limited number, always on call via mutual aid agreement across Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, and Massachusetts. Someone, from somewhere, would be here to help fast, but it would still take time.

Ergo, Willy’s suggestion that they keep going to find out what Shaw had prepared.

They found it near the rear of the house. A large room, outfitted as a library, lined with books and comfortable reading chairs situated by a few windows. In its center, as a distinct counterpoint to the room’s peaceful intention, was a man sitting on a folding metal chair.

It was a wide-eyed Seamus Kyle, wearing an explosive vest crisscrossed with electrical wires.

“Nobody move,” Willy said from the door.

Nobody did.

There’s a dilemma in these situations that most action movies skip: Is the person in the vest friend or foe? Given their belief that Seamus had followed Shaw’s orders in eliminating Lucy, there was no obvious way for Joe or Willy to know if this situation reflected a choice on Seamus’s part or something else. Was this a blastoff moment for a greater cause? Or had the young man been as manipulated as the two cops in creating this quandary?

First things first, Joe therefore thought, and asked, “Seamus? Without moving your head or any other part of your body, can you tell us if you’re okay?”