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 reasons 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.”

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.