to be on his game when the Dark Web killers arrived. If the thugs behind Tragedy did not come to clean up their mess, someone else would. After all, if Dorian Purcell was capable of dealing with murder-for-hire types, he was capable of taking extreme action through other surrogates.
Before he slept, Ben wanted to tour the house to familiarize himself with its rooms, check the doors and windows for adequate locks, and scope out the most likely approach that an enemy would take if they intended to make a surprise entrance.
He didn’t bother Rosa Leon in the first guest room, but as he checked out other rooms, he discovered that second-floor windows were not connected to the security system unless they overlooked a porch roof. Those that could be reached only with a ladder weren’t wired for an alarm, which was a common but foolish practice of many security companies. He’d need half an hour—and Megan’s approval—to nail the moving sashes shut, as there wasn’t time to have the alarm company work those windows into the system.
She was in the downstairs study, at the desk, reading Woody’s 104-page report, and Ben didn’t want to bother her. He found the ground-floor doors and windows reasonably well secured. Glass would have to be broken to gain entrance; there were glass-break sensors, as well as backup batteries that might keep the system functioning for a few hours if the public power were cut.
In the side hallway, he became enchanted by the examples of her art that hung on the walls, and he was most captivated by the canvas in progress in her studio—Woody feeding the deer in moonlight.
When he saw the painting, he dared believe that he had found the woman he had been looking for all his life. He was a romantic; he didn’t deny that or make excuses for it. In spite of their many eccentricities, Brenaden Septimus Hawkins’s parents had loved each other and had raised three well-balanced and happy, if oddly named, children. He didn’t want a woman like his mom, and he was different from his father, but he hoped for a match as right as theirs had been. He had been taken with Megan on first sight, but he wasn’t a man for whom looks mattered most. He’d had too much experience of women whose exterior beauty masked an inner ugliness or, almost worse, a vapidity that would make a life together too empty to endure. Already he’d seen evidence that Megan possessed uncommon fortitude, wisdom, wit, a good heart, and other qualities that he had not before found so concentrated in one person. Now this painting suggested that she saw the beauty of the world in its fullness, not just its surface dazzle, because what she rendered on this canvas was reality as the eye perceived it but enhanced by what deep insight and intuition told her about the layers of reality that the eye alone could not perceive. In spite of the subject, the work wasn’t sentimental; it presented a scene of moonlit wonder, yes, but it was a composition that also conveyed both the fragility of the peace we seek and the darkness that could at any moment close in upon us.
As a Navy SEAL, he had fought for his country and would have died for it. In these last few hours with Megan and Woody and Kipp, however, Ben had been overcome by a rapidly growing sense of family as strong as what he had felt in his parents’ home. It was this, after all, that made a country worth fighting and dying for, and life worth living.
95
Ben stopped in the open doorway of Megan’s study just when she would have had to go searching for him. She swiveled away from the computer and said, “I put in the address, and I got to the Tragedy site on the Dark Web. It was just like the screenshots in Woody’s report. Then it suddenly went dark. Now it doesn’t seem to be there anymore. I can’t reconnect with it.”
“They’ve taken it down? Folded up the tent and gone away?” he asked as he approached the desk.
“I think maybe they have.” She found hope in that prospect. “If they know they’ve been found out, wouldn’t they want to close shop and skip? With their client list, they can open with a new address, a different name. Maybe what Woody did doesn’t matter that much to them. Maybe from their point of view, it’s