Measure of Darkness

by Chris Jordan

  The guarded look has turned suspicious. “Maybe you better show me some ID.”

  I open my wallet, hand her my driver’s license.

  “This could be fake.”

  “Could be, but it’s not. We have reason to believe Joey is missing. Would you know anything about that?”

  “You think I’d kidnap a little boy?”

  “No, of course not. By the way, you know my name is Alice,” I say. “What’s yours?”

  She thinks about not telling me, decides against it. “Clare,” she says, as if daring me to contradict her.

  “You seem to be angry, Clare. I’m sorry if I made you feel that way. I’m just trying to help my boss find a missing child.”

  “Not angry,” she says, dropping her voice to barely a whisper. “Afraid.”

  “Afraid of me?” I say, incredulous.

  “Maybe. If you’re one of them.”

  “I’m sorry,” I say. “One of who?”

  “One of Professor Keener’s enemies.”

  Clare crosses her plump little arms, looking brave and afraid and defiant, all at once. And then she tells me, bit by bit, the most amazing tale.

  “A few months after founding QuantaGate, Joseph met a beautiful Chinese woman at a party hosted by Jonny Bing, on his big yacht. He didn’t want to go— Joseph wasn’t exactly a party animal—but Bing insisted he make an appearance, it was important to the company. Anyhow, she was there at the party. Ming-Mei. I don’t know if that’s a stage name or what, but she claimed to be a singer and actress in Hong Kong. Didn’t speak English, so Jonny Bing acted as translator. Very attractive, obviously. Ming-Mei, I mean. After a few days she returned to Hong Kong, and then a week or so later, with the help of an English-speaking friend, she contacted Joseph by email. Result, she returns to Boston— I happened to know that Joseph paid for her ticket—and he leased her an apartment in Chinatown. He thought she’d be more comfortable around Cantonese speakers, although he insisted that she take English lessons, with an eye toward applying for citizenship. I know this because Joseph asked me to find her a tutor.”

  “So it was a romantic involvement.”

  Clare shrugged. “I’m not sure Joseph really understood romance, but for sure he was under her spell. A real manipulator, that one.”

  “So you got to know her?”

  She shakes her head. “Only from what Joseph told me. He wanted to marry Ming-Mei, and help her establish a career in America, but she claimed to already be married to a man who had abandoned her and that she had some difficulty obtaining a divorce. Joseph believed her, but I didn’t. You understand about him, right? His problem?”

  “There was some allusion to Asperger’s syndrome.”

  “Yeah, well, the poor man could have been a poster boy for high-achieving autistics. He knew everything there is to know about quantum physics, but nothing about people in general, and certainly less than nothing about women. My opinion, in her real life Ming-Mei might have been an escort or prostitute. But that’s just a guess, from the way she acted. At the very least she’s a gold digger. She very conveniently got pregnant within a few months of arriving in Boston.”

  “How did Professor Keener react to that?”

  “Hard to tell—you’d have to have known him to know how hard—but I think he was pleased in that he assumed it meant Ming-Mei would marry him. Oddly enough—although not odd for Joseph—he didn’t assume they would actually live together when married. At one point he was shopping for another home in his neighborhood, a house that would be for Ming-Mei and the baby. He was quite specific about the impossibility of sharing a house with anyone, even the mother of his child.”

  “Because of his Asperger’s.”

  Clare shrugs. “Or his shyness, or his being a genius, or whatever. Despite what was obvious to me and to most people who knew him, Joseph didn’t believe he had Asperger’s. He always said it was just that he preferred to be alone most of the time.”

  “The baby, Clare. Where was he born?”

  She shrugs. “The Cambridge Birthing Center. And no, Joseph didn’t attend. I could have told her that—he found the whole idea of the actual birth process very icky.”

  Keener hadn’t attended the birth of his son. Assuming Ming-Mei hadn’t wanted to name him as the father for some reason, that would explain why his name was never associated with the boy in the official birth records.

  “So did he buy her that house nearby?”

  “Not then, no. A month or so after the baby was born she returned to Hong Kong so that relatives could help her care for the infant. At least that was her story. And the odd thing is, Joseph wasn’t as upset as you might expect. He was freaked out whenever baby Joey cried or soiled his diaper, and seemed to be satisfied with video versions.”

  “The video version?” I say, thinking of what Shane had mentioned.

  “Clips attached to his email. Typical new-mother stuff. The baby eating, the baby cooing and so on.”

  “Which he shared with you.”

  Clare’s look tells me I’ll never understand her relationship to the professor and I should probably quit trying. “He’d put them up on his computer screen and then leave his office while I watched. Which was typical of Joseph. He wanted to share but he didn’t want to be there when it happened.”

  “If he did have something like Asperger’s, he might well have found loud noises intolerable,” I point out. “A baby’s cry can be very loud. Very…disturbing.”

  Clare concedes the point. Joseph did indeed find the baby’s crying quite difficult to handle, and he remained content with being a video dad for the first year or so.

  “He never visited Hong Kong?”

  She shakes her head. “Not then, no. And when Joey was a year old Ming-Mei came back and set up house in an Arlington condo. I helped Joseph pick it out—you won’t be surprised to hear he couldn’t stand dealing with the real estate people. He gave her that condo, too. He insisted that the title be in her name.”

  “You really don’t like her,” I say.

  “That phony bitch?” Clare crosses her plump, freckled arms. “Why would I?”

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Do Tell

  All of which I repeat to Naomi. “My opinion, she loved the guy,” I add.

  Naomi leans back in her seat at the command center, tents her fingers. “Nothing about the man sounds particularly lovable.”

  “Since when has that stopped anyone of the female persuasion? Or the male, for that matter? Okay, think of her as an office wife. There’s no doubt Professor Keener relied on Clare, and unless she’s an amazing liar, he confided in her. Told her things he apparently told no one else.”

  “Clare Jeanne O’Malley,” Naomi says, sounding skeptical. “Teddy’s running a background as we speak.”

  “I’ll bet you a box of sugar donuts she comes up clean.”

  “I don’t eat sugar donuts,” she says with a shudder.

  “No, but I do.”

  “So, what happened next, did they ever move in together?”

  “Well, according to Clare, things are peachy for a couple of years. The professor has his house in Cambridge. Ming-Mei and the baby have their place in Arlington. Clare has the impression he rarely if ever visited them there, that by arrangement they visited him. This was apparently at Ming-Mei’s insistence. She ran the show. The professor danced to her tune, according to Clare, who thought at the time that Ming-Mei was trying to get him used to having people in his house. Sort of preparing the ground so she could eventually move in, or persuade him to buy a much bigger and grander house where they’d all live together. Which he was resisting. Professor Keener liked things just the way they were. He may have danced to the lady’s tune, but he was also very stubborn. Liked things distant but close. Again, Clare’s impression, and her words, ‘distant but close.’ Recall she never actually met Ming-Mei, and got this in bits and pieces from a man who wasn’t exactly a great communicator. So her version is very one-sided.”


  “Understood.”

  “My impression: some of his strangeness rubbed off on her. Clare, I mean. Anyhow, she convinced herself, Clare again, that the hot romance aspect had cooled once Ming-Mei was pregnant, and over the years the relationship evolved into something else entirely. Keener still wanted to marry her, but only to legitimize the boy. Maybe that was Clare’s wishful thinking, maybe not. But she was very definite about what happened next.

  “When Joey was about three, Ming-Mei insisted, out of the blue, that she and the boy needed to visit her family in Hong Kong, right away. This was fine with the professor—naturally he financed the trip, had Clare arrange for last-minute first-class tickets. She distinctly recalls the airline, Cathay Pacific, and the price, a little over fourteen thousand, round-trip. Clare was outraged on his behalf—what was wrong with business class, why did she have to fly first?—but the professor didn’t bat an eye. So off they go to Hong Kong, mother and son, but the thing is, they never return. The ticket is open—one reason it was so pricey—and the visit, which was supposed to be for a few weeks, stretched into months. The professor started getting antsy—there had been no emailed video clips to amuse him during this interval—and six months into the separation, he flew to Hong Kong intending, or so he told Clare, to persuade Ming-Mei to return.

  “The visit did not go well. Clare doesn’t know the details—he clammed up even more than usual—but when he got back he was so upset that he canceled his lectures and refused to leave his house for a couple of weeks—Clare had to have his work messengered back and forth. Keener had returned a changed man, more difficult than ever, and started spending more and more time at his lab at QuantaGate. As a consequence, Clare saw less and less of him, and can only guess at what was really going on. Nothing good, was her conclusion. She surmised the breakup had been final—maybe there was another man, maybe not, Clare couldn’t tell—and Ming-Mei was making it difficult for him to see Joey, or even to communicate with the boy. Then, about a year after Ming-Mei returned to Hong Kong, one of her relatives—Clare thinks it was an aunt—called the professor with devastating news. Joey had been kidnapped. Snatched from an upscale mall while Ming-Mei shopped, gone in an instant when she looked away. The aunt and everybody else in the family—and the local police, too, apparently—assumed the boy had been stolen by one of the mainland gangs that procure replacement kids for parents who lost children in the earthquake.”

  “So the boy has been missing for more than a year.”

  “Apparently, yes. Immediately on hearing the news Professor Keener took a leave of absence, went to Hong Kong and from there to the mainland to search for the boy. He was gone for two months—took medical leave with MIT’s permission—and returned broken inside. Clare described him as ‘hollowed out.’ The experience would have been difficult for a normal person—for him having to deal with strangers was torture. He had bribed police in Hong Kong, hired private investigators in Beijing, pleaded with government officials, all to no avail. He came back to Cambridge convinced he would never see Joey again. Clare tried to get through to him, suggested grief counseling and so on, but he refused help and threw himself into his work. Clare says he began spending about eighty percent of his time at QuantaGate, often sleeping over in his lab. And showing up on campus only when it was absolutely necessary.”

  “You don’t recover from a thing like that.”

  “Right,” I agree. “But there’s a strange kind of twist. For the first time, the professor alluded to his distrust of Ming-Mei. Apparently he suspected that she may have been involved in the kidnapping of her own child. Clare never liked the woman, but she was dismissive of the idea—the woman she’d seen in all those video clips had clearly loved the boy. She said the professor never could figure people out, that he had no ability to read faces. He was ‘easy to fool and got people wrong,’ that’s how she put it. Plus, he’d become increasingly paranoid. Clare got the impression that he believed he was being spied on.”

  “Oh? Now, that’s interesting,” Naomi says. “Spied on by who?”

  “Clare didn’t know, and she thinks he didn’t know, not really, although he complained about his own security guards poking around. That’s how she put it, ‘poking around.’”

  “At the university? No, unlikely,” she says, correcting herself. “At his company.”

  “Correct. QuantaGate.”

  “Fascinating.”

  “Thought you’d like it. But there’s more. Another twist. Ten days before he was killed, Keener took Clare aside. Everything had changed yet again, his whole demeanor. He had suddenly become convinced that he’d been ‘wrong about everything.’ Clare’s words. She’d never seen him so agitated or excited. And the weird thing was, he was happy. No, happy is wrong—her impression was that he was ‘filled with hope,’ which isn’t the same thing as happy, necessarily. I asked, did he tell her why he was suddenly hopeful, and she said no, not exactly, but her gut told her it had something to do with Joey—what else could it be? He did tell her that ‘someone was going to help,’ and that it would ‘soon be over.’ Clare had no idea who or what he was referring to, but I’m assuming that the ‘someone’ was Randall Shane.”

  Naomi nods. “Makes sense. That’s about when Shane came into the picture.”

  “That was their final conversation, and his last visit to his campus office. Clare texted him various messages about physics department business, but he never responded. He was either in the lab at QuantaGate, or home.”

  “We can’t know his location for a certainty, and we shouldn’t presume.”

  “True. We have nine days unaccounted for. For all we know he could have been in Paris or London or Hong Kong. But somehow I doubt it. He was waiting for his son to be returned.”

  “When Shane recovers, we’ll have a much better idea of the timeline.”

  “If he recovers.”

  “Yes. If.”

  Silence, while we think about that and what it might mean, both for Randall Shane and the missing boy.

  “One thing that bothers me,” I say. “Why would anybody shoot a textbook and put pictures of it on the wall, in a place of learning?”

  Naomi smiles. Understanding that this is my gift, a chance to dazzle and impress me with her amazing mind and memory. She doesn’t fail.

  “Harold Edgerton, the inventor of the stroboscopic flashbulb,” she says, not missing a beat. “Born 1903, died 1990. Famous for his amazing stop-action photographs, taken in his lab at MIT. A droplet of milk that looks like a miniature crown, captured in a microsecond. A bullet exploding through an apple, that’s his most famous shot. Doc Edgerton loved his bullets, loved to stop them in time.”

  “Too bad he isn’t still around,” I say, musing. “We could use a guy who can stop bullets.”

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Rumors of Interest

  Dane Porter has excellent thumbs, and if there is ever to be a contest for dexterous and speedy texting, she feels confident that she’d win. Her client, Randall Shane, is conked out for the moment, and in any event isn’t likely to complain if she parks her butt on the windowsill of his private—and very secure—room and brings her BlackBerry up to date. Legal matters, social engagements and enough gossip to fuel a reality show, if only they knew. Which they probably do, given that her list of correspondents includes a number of media-savvy individuals otherwise known as celebrities.

  She’s bouncing flirts off an old girlfriend when a tall, broad-shouldered woman ducks in, having flashed an ID at the police officer stationed just outside the door.

  “Monica?”

  The assistant director ignores her greeting, heads straight for the patient. Right, Dane thinks, old pals, possibly lovers. Bevins touches Randall Shane’s hand, cupping it gently in both her own, but the big guy remains unconscious, submerged in deep sleep.

  Dane remains perched on the windowsill, not wanting to intrude, but not wanting to disturb the moment by leaving, either. And when the attending physician ent
ers to offer a consult, and Dane makes her move to exit, Bevins locks eyes with her, indicates that she should stay.

  Three minutes later, the doctor having slipped away, Monica Bevins picks up a chair in one hand, quietly positions it next to the windowsill and sinks her long and large frame onto the seat with a sigh.

  “I was hoping you’d be here,” the big woman says, her voice barely above a whisper. “We need to talk.”

  Dane is a bit surprised by the opening gambit, but then she gets it. “Assistant Director Bevins, you know I can’t disclose anything the suspect may have said to me in confidence. Lawyer/client privilege.”

  If it’s possible to snort quietly, that’s what the FBI agent does. “Lawyers,” she says, wrinkling her nose. “I’m here as a friend, you idiot. Not to build a case against a man I love like a brother. Give me a freakin’ break.”

  “Sorry. My mistake.”

  Bevins sighs, glances at the man in the bed, her eyes moist. “My God, look at him,” she says. “I bet he hasn’t slept that good, or that deeply, since the accident. You know about that, of course.”

  “His wife and daughter. Yes.”

  Bevins nods. “The doc says what he’s doing, he’s catching up. That whatever was done to him, it involved keeping him awake in a heavily drugged state for days. That, combined with his existing sleep disorder, may have deeply affected his memory.”

  Dane checks to make sure the police officer remains on the far side of the open door, unable to overhear their whispered conversation. That was part of the deal, along with the handcuff to the bed rail, that the door would have to remain open, to prevent what the custody detectives called “any funny stuff.” There’s the usual ambient noise of a hospital, plus the urban symphony of perpetual construction—jackhammers rattling in the distance—and the hiss and moan of traffic on Storrow Drive. Dane concludes that as long as they keep it low, there’s no way they can be overheard.