Measure of Darkness (11 page)

M
ore than anything, Joey wants to escape. Not only from the finished basement where he and New Mommy have been banished, and which is like a real house except without windows, but from the inside of his own head. It hurts to think about Mi Ma, his real mommy, because worrying about her puts a painful lump in his throat, makes it hard to breathe. In his short life Joey has often been moved from place to place, had to get used to new rooms and even new caregivers, but in all that time his real mommy was always there. They had never been separated for more than a day or so, and then she would come rushing back and sweep him into her arms, and it was almost worth it, her being away, because it's so wonderful when she comes back. It feels like music bubbling up from everywhere, not just from the keyboard into his earphones, but from the walls and the air and from somewhere deep inside. That's what being happy feels like, and he longs for it. At such times, when she has had to be away, Mi Ma sings for him, whole songs almost perfectly in key—bad notes make him grimace, even when he's trying to be polite—but his mother has a very good voice, almost as true in timbre as the notes
emitting from his keyboard, the measured chords and octaves that flow from his small fingertips.

Sometimes the music comes through his fingers in a kind of tickle, like he's touching something soft and alive, a little kitten made of music, and he just keeps stroking the keys without having to think about it. What Mi Ma calls “Joey music,” because it belongs to him. Other times, like today, he looks at notes on paper and the music enters through his eyes and comes out through his hands, again without him having to think about it very much, but the experience is very different. As if he's tuning to a different channel inside his head, the channel where Mozart is always playing. Joey loves the way the numbers and key signatures of the early Mozart sonatas flow so perfectly, bringing themselves to life, each note exactly the right note, all bubbling up into a stream of living music. Sonata no. 1 in C Major, Sonata no. 2 in F Major and then of course the Third Sonata in B-flat Major. Perfect. It could be no other way, and the rightness of it calms him.

When it comes to reading words on a page, Joey's skills are rudimentary at best. In that respect he's a typical five-year-old. He knows the alphabet but has trouble sounding out the words, which don't always make sense. Sometimes two words together sound unpleasantly dissonant and he hates to look at them. Not like when he reads musical notation, which always makes sense, and which he doesn't have to think about or struggle over. He can hear the music when he sees the notes, and it is a simple matter to press the correct keys in the correct order to let the music out. Except of course when his fingers make a mistake. Which is why he can sometimes lose himself in playing the same piece over and over, until his fingers
learn how to do it on their own, because he hates to make unpleasant sounds happen.

Joey escapes into the soothing repetition. It takes him to a place where nothing exists but the music and his hands and the notes resonating in his earphones. Tuning out the world around him, easing his anxiety. Letting him forget, for a while, how much he misses his real mommy and how much the big man scares him, and how more than anything he wants to go home so Mi Ma can sing to him.

He escapes so completely into the music that he never notices New Mommy searching along the walls of the basement, looking for a way out, should an escape become necessary, one eye on the padlocked door, fearful that Kidder may return.

T
he fear is deep, abiding and specific. He fears that part of his brain has been removed, or in some other way destroyed. That's the only rational explanation for the huge hole in his memory, and the cool black nothingness from which he has finally emerged, alive but damaged. It's not like the memories are buried somewhere deep inside his mind, submerged by trauma. They're simply gone. Removed.

Memories of something bad, he concludes, something terrible, because his left wrist is chained to the hospital bed and there's a uniformed cop guarding the door, and because the woman attending him seems fearful, as if he might lunge at her, take a bite.

“Mr. Shane? Randall Shane? I'm Dr. Gallagher. You've been admitted to Massachusetts General Hospital. I'm sorry about the handcuffs, but they insisted.”

“Killer,” he says, the word rumbling from the hollow in his throat.

“Excuse me?” the pretty doctor says, flinching.

He rattles the cuff. “Who did I kill?”

“I, um, don't know anything about your legal situation, Mr. Shane. All I know is, you're under my care, and
will remain here until I'm satisfied it's medically safe for you to be released. You've been rather badly beaten. It wasn't obvious when you were first admitted, but your body is massed with bruises. Most of the fingers on your right hand were dislocated, and the ligaments have been badly strained.”

Shane glances at his right hand. Noticing the elaborate splint must trigger something, because now it hurts like hell.

“The physical bruising is actually the least of it,” the pretty young doctor continues. “Bruises heal. My real concern is neurological damage from the drugs. We know you were given a massive dose of benzodiazepine, enough to black out an elephant, frankly. You must have been on a drip for hours, or possibly even days. And there's evidence of other psychotropic drugs, of a type we've not been able to identity. We do know they were quite powerful, because there's been evidence of dementia.”

“I'm demented,” he says, not the least surprised.

“You seem to be coming out of it, slowly,” she assures him. “It will be some time before we can assess whether there's been any long-term damage.”

Shane looks at her, carefully forming his words before letting them go. “They removed part of my brain,” he says, confiding.

She smiles. “So you've been saying ever since you regained consciousness. Let me assure you once again: there's absolutely no evidence of surgery. None. No such surgery took place. The MRI revealed perfectly normal brain mass. No lesions, no sign of intrusion. Whatever loss you're feeling, Mr. Shane, is a result of the drugs that were administered.”

“Drill,” he insists, the memory bursting. “They drilled a hole in my head.”

The sound of the drill bit vibrating through his skull, rattling his eyes in their sockets. Screeching as it hits bone.

But the pretty doctor says, “No. No. Nothing like that happened. Perhaps it was suggested to you, when you were under the influence of the benzodiazepine. Maybe they used the sound of a drill to frighten you. But I assure you, no holes have been drilled in your skull. You're perfectly intact. The only damage that concerns me is from the drugs themselves, and there's simply no way of knowing about long-term neurological effects—you might well make a complete recovery. Although it's doubtful you'll regain the short-term memory of whatever transpired. You've lost a few days, Mr. Shane. They're gone. You'll just have to accept that.”

“Bastards.”

“Whoever did this to you, yes.”

“Sleepy.”

“You've been given a mild sedative. Nothing like the powerful hypnotics you were given, but it will help with the anxiety.”

“No,” he says, struggling to rise. “The boy! The boy!”

He sleeps.

 

“Hey, Shane. That's what they call you right? Just plain Shane? I'm your attorney. And don't you worry, we're going to get 'em.”

“What?” he asks, mouth dry.

Strange, but he doesn't remember waking up. Another young woman. Pixie with big eyes. Not like the doctor, who has freckles, chubby cheeks and seems to be afraid of him. This one isn't afraid.

“The bad guys,” the pixie says. “Identity as yet unknown. We'll find 'em, though. Naomi Nantz is on the case, and she always gets her man, ha-ha. Seriously, she does. So, do you remember anything at all?”

“Nothing there to remember. Black hole. Who you?”

“Sorry. Dane Porter. I'm the only one allowed to talk with you, other than your physician.”

“Lawyer.”

“Correct. I'm representing you. This murder beef is bull, we know that much. A bad frame job, way over the top. I've been on the horn with Tommy Costello, he's the Middlesex D.A., about what kind of guy you are, a genuine hero, and how there's no way you shot your client, not a possibility, did not happen. He'll come around. Leave that to me. Until then, the important thing is to find the kid, right? The little boy? Your client's missing child? Joey? That's the boy's name, correct?”

Shane feels as if a small, dim light has been turned on, in the darkness inside his head. “Little Joey, yes. Call his father, please. Very important.” He searches, is astonished to find the name. “Joseph Keener,” he exclaims. “Professor, MIT.”

The pixie winces. “Sorry. Professor Keener was killed in his home. You found the body. I'm sorry, I assumed you remembered that much.”

“I found the body?”

“Uh-huh. Called 911 to report it, then arranged to meet your buddy Jack Delancey. He brought you to see Naomi Nantz. But before you had a chance to tell us much about the case, a team of badass cowboys kicked in the windows, put you down, took you away.”

“Cowboys?”

“Figure of speech. More like a covert special-ops
team. They had you for three days. You were tortured, drugged, then dumped at this hospital.”

“Wrecked my brain. Stole my memories.”

“Yeah, that really sucks, I'm sure,” she says kindly. “We're hoping you get it back. The memories. Not the torture memories, it might best if you forgot that part entirely. But anything you know about the boy. Where he might be. Who might be holding him. And for that matter what happened to his mother.”

“Here,” Shane says instantly, the word firing like a bullet from a waking synapse in his brain. “Joey is here.”

“Oh my God,” the pixie says. “You remembered something! The boy is here? Where, exactly? Do you know?”

Shane shakes his head, trying to clear away the tendrils of emptiness. “Bridge,” he says suddenly. “Crossing Harvard Bridge. Video.”

The pixie looms closer, her eyes as large as moons. “Let me get this: you saw a video recording of Joey Keener crossing Harvard Bridge?”

“Yes.”

“By himself?”

“Can't remember. No, somebody else was there.”

“His mother?”

“Can't remember. No, not his mother.”

“Where did you see this video? Was it part of a ransom demand?”

Shane grits his teeth, concentrates. Nothing. Wherever it came from, the memory has retreated.

“Gone,” he says, and collapses back on his pillow.

Somebody groans in pain. Can't be the pretty pixie, voice too deep. Then the darkness reaches up, pulls him down.

He doesn't fight it.

“T
hat's huge,” Naomi says. “Harvard Bridge. That puts Joey right in the middle of the MIT campus, not far from the professor's residence.”

“Maybe he was going the other way,” Teddy points out. “From Cambridge to Boston. Like running away.”

“A possibility,” boss lady concedes. “Jack? Any thoughts?”

“Shane might well be referring to a video ransom note, as Dane suggests. Sent to the father, I'm assuming. We've got your son, close enough for you to reach out and touch. Here's proof, now pay up or else. Or give us the secret, or whatever they're after. Whoever
they
are.”

“There were no cameras or computers found at the residence,” Naomi points out. “No DVDs. Not even a cell phone. Nothing to store a video file.”

“We already knew the place was wiped clean,” Jack responds, his arms folded.

We're in the command center, convening. More like kibitzing, firing out ideas, hoping something will stick. Everybody is pumped. Hope is alive, feeding us energy.

“Teddy? Find out if there are traffic cams on Harvard
Bridge. If so, we need access to any recordings within, say, a two-week time frame.”

Naomi leans back from her desk. Her eyes have that faraway look that means she's processing information. We all wait. Thirty seconds pass. A very long half minute. I'm studying my nails—what to do about the cuticles?—when she snaps back, totally in the moment, and goes, “What about Shane? He started out as a computer geek, right? Therefore he would have had a laptop, at the very least. Was it recovered at his motel room by the state police?”

“If so, they're not sharing,” Jack says thoughtfully. “But you're right, he'd have had a laptop. Absolutely.”

“So that's another question that needs answering: where is Shane's laptop?”

“Wait,” says Jack, sitting up even straighter. “Damn! He has an iPhone. That's how he called me. Not on the professor's landline, because his name popped up like it always does, and when I met him in Kendall Square he had the iPhone in his hand, slipped it into his pocket.”

Naomi considers, then pronounces, “Forget the phone. His assailants will have seized that, and accessed whatever it may or may not contain. But the laptop is interesting. Obviously he didn't have it with him when he came to us. That leaves three possibilities. One: he left it in his motel room, and it has been seized and taken into evidence by law enforcement. Two: he secreted it somewhere in his vehicle, which has been impounded and, we assume, thoroughly searched by Cambridge felony detectives. Three: he hid it elsewhere.”

Jack is already shaking his head. “No way he left it in his ride. He knew the car would be impounded at the scene. He assumed the vehicle was compromised because
his gun had been taken. That's why he abandoned the car and proceeded on foot to Kendall Square to meet me.”

“He told you that, specifically?”

“Didn't have to. That's what I would have done. The missing gun told him everything. From that moment, Shane knew he was in the middle of a frame. He couldn't risk driving the car—for all he knew, it had already been tagged with a GPS tracker.”

“Again, he discussed this with you?”

“No discussion required. It's an understood thing.”

“So you and Shane have, what, a psychic connection?”

Another man might have been insulted by the caustic comment, but Jack, knowing boss lady's methods, shrugs it off. “We received the same training. To a certain extent, in operative terms, we think alike.”

“Operative terms.”

“Correct.”

“Acknowledged,” she says, satisfied. “Good point. Find out if the Cambridge cops found a tracking device in his car.”

“Done,” says Jack. He opens his cell and steps out of the room.

Naomi swivels in her chair. “Teddy? Any joy on the traffic cams?”

Teddy looks up from the screen, grimaces. “Nope. None on Harvard Bridge. There may be MIT security cameras somewhere in the area, farther up Mass Ave. If so, they won't be advertised. I'm looking.”

The swiveling chair turns in my direction. “Alice? Are you up for another visit across the river?”

Silly question.

 

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology spans a mile or so of Cambridge frontage on the Charles River,
facing Boston and the world.
Love that dirty water,
as they used to sing. And still do in certain Boston bars at closing time. Or so I've heard. I'm not a closing-time kind of girl, for the most part. Not surprisingly my ex-husband, the con man, he knew all the words to “Dirty Water” so he could croon along with the inebriated locals, even though his knowledge of the city, as I now understand, came mostly from old reruns of
Cheers
.

Enough about my ex. He can't even really be my ex if he was still married to the last three wives he bamboozled, right? They didn't call him Wedding Willy for nothing. Okay, so I'll shut up about Mr. Adorable, whatever his real name is. May he rot in hell, or Toronto, or wherever they've got him under lock and key.

I'm over him. Totally.

It being a fair kind of late-spring day—blue skies, warm breezes wafting the perfume of steaming asphalt— I retrieve my bike from the garage, don the dorky helmet and pedal across the river on my new Trek Soho, the urban model with the cool carbon belt instead of a chain. Knowing full well that to impress a typical MIT undergraduate I'd have to be riding a unicycle on top of a skateboard while juggling spheres of plutonium. No, not common old plutonium, that's so yesterday—make it antimatter. Anything less and a fully adult female becomes invisible to college kids, assuming she's more or less fully clothed and hasn't had humungous breast implants recently. Not that it matters—I'm not here for the undergrads, and a little invisibility might be useful, even if it doesn't exactly keep the ego properly inflated.

The quarry, courtesy of a boss lady brain fart—excuse me, sudden inspiration—is the faculty lounge in the Department of Physics. Not as easy as it sounds, because it turns out the physics department is spread all over
the campus, and the physics professors, all hundred and twenty of them, find all sorts of places to consort with each other. Like extremely intelligent cockroaches, as one undergraduate blogger put it. Charming thought. I envision a bunch of geeky dudes with unbrushed mandibles, chittering away as they consume, cups and all, Styrofoam containers of heavily sugared coffee. The same blogger (he calls himself “Gregor,” by the way, and yes, I got it) refers to the physics faculty as “8-Ballers” because the courses all begin with that number. 8.01 being the introductory course, 8.04 being Quantum Physics and so on.

8-Ballers. Sounds sort of cute. In contrast to the hollow-eyed summer-semester students who stumble around campus fueled by energy drinks, swelling their talented brains with ever more information. None of those spotted in the halls of physics actually have white tape wrapped around the stems of their glasses, clichéd geek style, but pocket protectors are much in evidence—almost, it seems, as an act of defiance, or even a badge of honor. A fair description of the average complexion would have to include the word
pasty,
and that applies to the dark-skinned students as well as the light. Every last one of them looks like she or he could use a day at the beach. I never do find a faculty lounge—so much for boss lady's big idea—but instead eventually stumble upon a cubicle corral of administrative assistants, one of whom instantly bursts into tears when I ask if any of them knew Professor Keener.

“Oh my God, it's so, so sad,” she says, sniffing. “Are you a friend?”

“Yes,” I tell her, and then amend, “Well, not exactly, but I have good intentions.”

The weeper, a slightly heavy woman of forty or so,
wears large thick-lensed glasses that magnify her watery blue eyes, distorting what would otherwise be an attractive, lightly freckled face. The fact that she's weeping makes me like her instantly—she's the first to exhibit an openly emotional reaction to the professor's violent death. Without saying another word—her cubicle mates are eyeballing the stranger who started the waterworks—she gets up from her desk and indicates that I should follow out into a foyer area that serves as a waiting room. No windows, pale walls, the only decoration a series of neatly framed black-and-white high-speed photographs of a bullet piercing a textbook, finally emerging with a little puff of exploded paper. Is shooting books an MIT thing? Somehow that seems unlikely. Whatever, it's not the mystery I'm here to solve.

The weeper plops heavily onto a couch, opens her purse and removes a tissue, using it to wipe her delicate, upturned nose. She sniffs, takes a deep breath and then in a surprisingly strong voice demands, “What do you mean, ‘good intentions'?”

The couch being the only seat in the little room, I perch on the opposite end, so as not to crowd her. “We're trying to locate his little boy. He's missing.”

“Joey,” she says, almost defiantly. “His name is Joey.”

“So you know about him?” I say, dumbfounded.

“Who are you, exactly?” she wants to know, suddenly guarded.

“My name is Alice Crane. I work for a private investigator.”

“So you're like a detective?”

I shake my head ruefully. “More like a secretary running an errand. My boss wants to know if Professor Keener's colleagues are aware that he has a child. Our impression was that he'd been keeping it a secret, for rea
sons yet to be determined. But the fact that you know about Joey, that pretty much changes everything. I can't wait to tell boss lady she's wrong.”

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.”