The boy had been awake for hours past his bedtime, fretting about his mother, who he calls Mi Ma. He’s a smart kid—some sort of musical genius or prodigy—and he knows that something is terribly wrong, how could he not? Spirited away from his piano class and put in the care of strangers, flown halfway around the world and lately locked in what amounts to a luxuriously appointed dungeon for days at a time. What is he supposed to think? He keeps asking why he can’t talk to Mi Ma on the phone and there’s no good answer, beyond “your mommy is too sick to talk but she’ll be better soon.” No surprise, the poor kid has begun to worry that Mi Ma is dead and that no one will tell him the truth. Joey isn’t the only one who knows something is wrong. When Kathleen agreed to help, alerted by a text message from Randall Shane, she was informed that the boy’s mother had to be taken into protective custody—some sort of gang problem, apparently, or maybe the mother had been undercover, it was never made clear—and Shane needed someone he could trust to look after her five-year-old son.
