“What was Lucy’s sin?” Joe asked. “Surely she knew all his warts already.”

Seamus shook his head again. This time, Willy barely noticed. “There you go again, thinking she was some ditzy arm candy. She was like his Bonnie What’s-her-name.”

“Parker,” Willy filled in absentmindedly, still lost in his analysis.

“What?”

“Bonnie and Clyde?” Joe asked. “She and Lemuel were partners in crime?”

“Yeah.”

“What sorts of crime?”

Joe felt as if he’d suddenly shouted in church. Seamus fell silent, seemingly shrinking into himself. Ouch, Joe thought. Time to back away from that.

“How did you and Shaw get together?” he asked instead. He stole a look at his watch, praying the missing members of the hasty team had been located and were nearby. Now that he and Willy had tripped the safe arm, assuming that’s what they’d done, the need for bomb technicians was not debatable.

Unfortunately, Joe’s foray into a new direction didn’t work. Seamus appeared beached against a growing gloom.

“Shaw worked in Boston, didn’t he?” Willy chimed in helpfully, rising at last and resuming his earlier position.

“What did he do there?” Joe followed up.

“Money stuff. I don’t know,” Seamus answered dully.

“But he did well. Rich guy.”

“He could buy all this,” Seamus made to sweep his arm through the air.

“No!” Willy ordered him.

Seamus froze, brought out of his funk by the yell. His eyes widened with fear, and his face showed its youth for the first time. “Are you gonna get me out of this?”

“We’re working on it,” Joe reassured him.

Time, distance, shielding, Christian Mock repeated to himself. Time, distance, and shielding. The holy trinity for tactical bomb techs, or TBTs. One or all three can kill you or save you, depending on how they played out. Speed but not haste, despite the “hasty” in their title; distance spoke for itself, except the Remotec robots that gave you the safest separation were too slow in a Cat A emergency; and shielding, meaning body suits and barriers, which didn’t even apply here.

The traditional eighty-pound bomb suits were too cumbersome to move in quickly and of no use anyhow in a proximate, atomizing pressure blast. For that matter, the all-cotton, nonconducting vest Mock was wearing now, as he walked “in the stack” with his three TAC team members—each holding the back of the vest of the man before him—only carried the tools of his trade. When disarming a device, he actually took it off and spread it out to have what he needed immediately available. If something went wrong, all TBTs knew there was no saving them anyway.

The holy trinity, in responses like this, boiled down to time alone, aided only by training and good luck.

The two detectives preceding them had left the mansion’s front door open, for which Mock was very grateful. He knew Gunther and Kunkle. Mock was a Vermont trooper himself, the nearest responder when the mutual aid call went out. The irony was that he did not know his hasty team colleagues, all from New Hampshire.