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
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
