Measure of Darkness

“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.

Chapter Twenty-One

8-Ballers

“That’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