The Barbarian Nurseries A Novel - By Hector Tobar Page 0,116
and took a subconscious step backward. He had managed to complete four years of high school and two years at Rio Hondo College without studying a single work of modern art, and he was also in the minority of people of Latino descent in Southern California who had never heard of Frida Kahlo. This is what they call “pathology.” I remember that from my criminology class. He next looked at Araceli’s cubist self-portrait and mistook it for a drawing of one of the two missing boys. What is the word for this? “Dismembered.” The face is dismembered. He started to wonder if perhaps the children were being harmed by this person in some hidden place.
Having seen enough, the deputy left the room and asked the father for photographs of the two boys and the nanny, and the man and his wife disappeared into other rooms deeper in the house to search for them. Once he was alone, the deputy called his station. There were two or three kidnap-to-Mexico cases every year in the county, though they always involved immigrant families and domestic disputes. A cross-border kidnap case in the Estates involving a nonrelative screamed urgency. At any rate, it was the usual procedure in cases of suspected child abuse and missing children to speak directly with the watch commander.
“Hey, Sarge, I’m up in the Estates and I think this is pretty serious. I’ve got two missing children. Possible kidnapping situation.”
“Huh?”
“I said I got a child kidnapping situation. Possible. Up here in the Estates.”
“In the Estates?”
“Yeah.”
“Aw, fuck.”
“Yeah, that’s what I’m talking about. I got two missing kids from the Estates. Looks like the nanny took ‘em. Mexico, maybe.”
“She took ‘em to Mexico?”
“Maybe. Don’t know. Looks like a line of investigation.”
“You got a ransom note?”
“No. But she didn’t have permission to take them anywhere either.”
“How long they been missing?”
“Since Sunday,” the deputy said, but then checked his notes and saw the parents had told him two different times. “Or yesterday, I guess.”
“Yesterday? Are you sure they’re not just late coming back from Knott’s Berry Farm or something?”
“Negative.”
There was a long pause on the other end of the phone, and Deputy Suarez understood why: among other things, when a peace officer declared a child missing, a county child-abuse file was opened, and an elaborate system of reports and notifications was triggered. The case entered a federal database, and county social workers were notified. It was a big bureaucratic to-do, and if the nanny suddenly walked up to the door in half an hour, it would all be just jerking off.
“So that’s your call, on scene there? Two missing kids in the Estates?”
“Yes.”
“How old?”
“Eight. Eleven.”
“Possible two-oh-seven kidnap to Mexico?”
“Yep.”
“Fuck.”
“Yeah, exactly.”
Over the course of the next several hours, the story of the Mexican housekeeper and the two missing boys from one of the richest neighborhoods in Orange County gathered mass and momentum in the digital flows of the news stream, pushed along with a flotsam of facts and half facts and speculations. It began with a stilted, bare-bones Sheriff’s Department press release: “missing since Sunday … ages 11 and 8 … in care of Mexican national … Border Patrol advised …” This information was delivered to various news organizations by the hopelessly archaic method of fax, and first landed in the hands of a reporter at the Sunset Boulevard headquarters of the news-tip agency City News Service. Working without any supervisor present at the cash-strapped company, a twenty-three-year-old scribe at the agency called the South County sheriff’s station at 1:45 a.m., eliciting from the half-alert deputy manning the phone that the case might be a kidnapping. “The deputy who rolled out on the first call says it’s a possible two-oh-seven to Mexico.” The CNS reporter then tagged the item for the agency’s 2:00 a.m. news roundup with the keywords “Child Kidnapping—Illegal Immigrant,” an act of journalistic carelessness that would take up an entire chapter in a PhD dissertation in the Communications Department at the University of Southern California two years later. “I boiled it down to the most exciting part,” said the former reporter, who was by then in law school. The City News Service bulletin appeared on a list of “breaking stories” dispatched by old-fashioned wire transmission to morning assignment editors at every newspaper and television and radio station in Southern California, and by six in the morning Pacific Daylight Time the story was on the websites of the CBS affiliates in Los Angeles and San Diego, the latter reporting the “enhanced surveillance” at