I had always heard that but didn’t know it was a real thing until I started putting people in jail for a living. It was, without a doubt, a true statement. Scary prisoners locked up for life had daughters too.
“Take me to Han,” I told the fourteen-year-old girl in my arms. “Let’s go see your little sister.”
It was one of the longest walks of my life.
MOST PEOPLE, if asked, probably thought the number of people who went into WITSEC every year was in the thousands, but it was actually far less. From when witness protection became a program in the 1970s to today, the number hovered somewhere between ten and eleven thousand, depending on what report you accessed or who you asked. Of that number, most were married or there was a significant other, some had families, and some were underage.
Because kids who had seen a crime committed—normally the death of one or both of their parents—could not be turned over to relatives unless they too entered WITSEC, most of them went into foster care. In Chicago there were, at the moment, a hundred and twelve underage kids placed with the Department of Child and Family Services, and while that agency was in charge of them, the caveat was that, along with their case manager/social worker, a liaison from the marshals’ office supervised them. So while DCFS struggled with the same things as every government agency—the deplorable lack of funding, the chronically understaffed clusterfuck, and widespread unreliable reporting—for the kids in WITSEC, it was supposed to be better because they had someone from the marshals’ office advocating for them. Sadly they dropped the ball on Wen and Han Li, whose parents, Dr. Herman Li and his wife, Jia, had been killed in a home invasion in Jacksonville, Florida.
It was a mistake. Gil “Piston” Baker, head of a local meth ring who had ties to a biker gang that was big in Florida, thought he was killing a rival when he was, in fact, killing a gifted cardiologist. In the dark, hopped up on meth, having mixed up the numbers of the address, he shot first, murdering the doctor and then his wife, who charged down the stairs after Dr. Li. The girls saw it all from the second floor and ran to their room, locked the door, and then climbed out the window and up onto the roof, cell phones in hand, before Baker even figured out what he’d done. Jacksonville PD caught him before he pulled out of the driveway.
Baker would have remained strong and not rolled over on the motorcycle club, but facing the needle for murdering the Lis, he turned on everyone he’d ever called friend. It was a long, arduous process, dismantling a gang that had ties to a cartel with fingers in prostitution, drugs, and guns. And because everything had to be disclosed, Baker’s gang knew all about Han and Wen, so they were placed into protective custody until the entire trial concluded—which was still years away—or Baker died. Since Baker was in fine health and had basically put out a bounty on each girl, WITSEC was their only option. Five months ago, they had been brought to Chicago. Ian and I did their intake paperwork and took them upstairs to Custodial WITSEC, run by Sebreta Cullen and overseen by new Supervisory Deputy Darren Mills.
Normally there was red tape. Normally there was a process and things took time—if and when an individual or a department was investigated, that would move at a glacial speed. The difference in this instance was the office faced a PR nightmare of biblical proportions that could effectively cripple the Northern District. It would blow the reputation of the marshals’ office to kingdom come. But more important than all of that was we were talking about underage children. Kage was so furious he wasn’t even yelling, which was a very, very bad sign. Heads were going to roll.
The problem was new because Mills put Cullen in her position after Maureen Prescott retired, and he was not required to run his pick by Kage. Because of that, and because Kage had his hands full with everything else, he hadn’t checked in on Custodial WITSEC.
I went with Kage to confront Cullen because I was the guy who’d called him. He charged into that office at four in the afternoon like the wrath of God.
He rattled off directions to his team, the accountants—because there were fiscal concerns if people weren’t watching the kids—then the social workers from the DCFS who would know what they were looking for, and of course, Prescott, who’d worked for Kage for years before retiring and still came when called. Kage brought some of the guys up from Judicial Security too, four total, and positioned them around the room so that when he told everyone to get up and walk to the conference room—he was clearing the area before he spoke to Cullen—no one hesitated. They just got up from their desks and moved.