Measure of Darkness (12 page)

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?”

A
ll 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 Ar
lington. 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.”

D
ane 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 enters 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 detec
tives 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.

“He remembers that Joey is alive,” Dane confides. “The professor's missing son.”

Bevins instantly perks up. “Location?”

“Unknown. But Joey was spotted in the vicinity.” She explains that in a moment of apparent lucidity, Shane recalled having seen a video of Joey taken on a bridge crossing the Charles River.

“A ransom clip?”

“Possibly. He didn't say. That was earlier today, we're trying to run it down.”

“And you've shared this information with who?”

Dane shrugs. “With my boss.”

“Not with the authorities?”

Dane gives her a level look. “It was the ‘authorities' who did this to him. Look, he's been interrogated for seventy-two hours straight and then discarded. The ‘authorities,' which happen to include you, have already been alerted to the possibility of a kidnapped child. We informed the Boston cops, the Cambridge cops and the local field office of the FBI, as I'm sure you know. The reaction? Professor Keener didn't have a child, so how could a kid that doesn't exist be missing or abducted?”

Bevins's smile is grim, acknowledging the truth of what Dane is saying.

“Mostly I didn't want a goon squad of macho detectives in here interrogating him yet again. The poor guy already thinks somebody removed part of his brain.”

Bevins winces. “Dr. Gallagher mentioned that that will pass.”

“Let's hope she's right. Meantime, Naomi Nantz is on the case. No small thing.”

“And you think having your boss in the hunt, that's better than any of these ‘authorities' you so clearly mistrust?”

“Absolutely. The local cops have already decided he's a stone killer and your FBI colleagues in the Boston office have yet to respond to our inquiries. We don't expect them to. The Bureau never shares, not with civilians.”

Bevins glances at the open doorway again, her eyes calculating. “I'm about to share, but it can't have come from me, do you understand? At this point I can't be seen conferring with a private investigator. Which is why I was hoping to catch you here at the hospital. I'm logged as visiting a sick friend, period.”

“Understood.”

The agent takes a breath, hesitates.

“Naomi is famous for her discretion,” Dane assures her. “You must know that.”

“Yeah,” Bevins says. “But what about you?”

“I'd pretend to be insulted but, really, what's the point?”

“Okay, fine. If you work for Nantz you must be okay. Here's the deal. When I spoke to you in Washington, I was under the impression that the Bureau never had Professor Keener on its radar, and that we certainly had nothing to do with Shane's rendition, if that's what it was. The latter is still true, but I was mistaken about Keener. He's been a subject of interest.”

Instantly, Dane focuses. “In what way a subject of interest?”

“An anonymous memo came through Homeland, alerting the Bureau to the fact that Keener, whose company is apparently involved in top-secret research, had made at least two unexplained visits to China. The inference being, he might be passing information to Chinese intelligence agents.”

“And was he?”

Bevins shrugs her wide shoulders. “I have no way of knowing. The Bureau did due diligence, concluded the subject had no contact with foreign agents. He'd been seen conversing with quite a number of Chinese people—not exactly surprising if you're visiting China—but none were identified as agents of the Chinese government. Therefore no evidence that he was passing secrets, either in China or here in the U.S., and therefore no further action was warranted. That information was bounced back to Homeland, as required, and there it stayed, with access restricted to the highest levels.”

“So the professor was no longer under surveillance?”

“Not by the Bureau, no. It's still within FBI purview to take the lead in espionage cases, but in the real world, post-911, and with the exception of the odd batch of Russians infiltrating the suburbs, the emphasis has been on counterterrorism, not spy catching. We're focused on the guy with the bomb strapped to his underwear, not the scientist with the laptop full of data. That's just how it is.”

“So the Bureau isn't interested, but others might be. Are you saying Professor Keener was under investigation by another agency? Can you be more specific?”

Bevins shakes her head. “Sorry, no. Can't, because I don't know for sure. Just a rumor of interest, you might call it. Persistent questions about Keener's connections to China—it was known that he had a Chinese girlfriend—
but no actual evidence to warrant FBI involvement. Somebody in the community didn't trust him, that's for sure.”

“This ‘rumor of interest,' did it mention the boy?”

Monica Bevins looks down, studying her large but somehow elegantly shaped hands. Elegant but for the fact that some of her nails are chewed to the quick. “There was a mention, yes, in the context of family vulnerabilities. It was noted that agents of the People's Liberation Army are known to intimidate their targets by making threats, usually very vague, about the well-being of family members who still reside in China.”

“That's it? No mention that Joey Keener was actually missing?”

Bevins shakes her head. “The circulated memo was a simple series of questions, the point of which was to stimulate an active response from interested agencies. Why had Professor Keener frequently emailed an address in Hong Kong? Why did he go there? What was he doing in mainland China? Who did he meet there? Was the mother of his illegitimate child an agent of the PLA? Was the child being used as leverage? Like that.”

“And you have no idea who circulated this memo?”

“I can guess, but sharing the specific source would be a felony, and I can't go there, not even for Naomi Nantz.”

“Not even for Randall Shane?”

Bevins's cold glare makes Dane feel like she's been drenched by a bucket of ice water. “The Bureau looks out for its own,” the big woman says, hotly. “We're now fully involved. There's an FBI alert out for the missing child, as of this morning. That's all you need to know.”

Before the young lawyer can apologize—testing and probing, that's her job, nothing personal—the patient
groans from his hospital bed. They both turn to see Shane attempting to sit up.

“Monica!” he cries in a ragged whisper.

A moment later the two old friends are embracing, faces wet with tears, and this time Dane Porter follows her best instincts and steps out of the room for a few minutes. Texting quietly as she goes.