“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 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.”