her to believe such an unlikely scenario. What is she going to do? Sell them in Tijuana? Make them her own children, teach them Spanish, and raise them in a tiny village in the mountains? None of this had she expressed to the other members of the intervention team. She didn’t need to, because the two sheriff’s detectives sent out to the scene had reached the same conclusion, more or less, though they were trying hard to be deferential to the weeping mother and the worried father.
After hearing the basic outline of the story from the father, Olivia Garza had wandered about the house. Too clean, she observed, too perfect. She looked into the Room of a Thousand Wonders and was unimpressed. If you saw too many toys, it implied distance, parents who substituted objects for intimacy, though the presence of so many books, and the variety of their sizes and subjects, was reassuring. Olivia Garza picked up a handful and examined the dog-eared pages of a novel, and then the worn cover of a picture book on medieval armor and decided, These kids are going to turn up by the end of the day. The members of Olivia Garza’s elite team had been precipitously assembled here simply because the family lived in the zip code with the highest per capita income in their district, and because the photogenic boys had attracted the news crews gathered outside. Some things are so obvious you just want to force them out like a wad of spit.
She encountered the two detectives back in the living room, off by the windows that looked out to the succulent garden.
“Is there anything else here I should see?”
“Have you seen the nanny’s room? It’s a little house in the back.”
They entered the guesthouse, which wasn’t much smaller, truth be told, than the condominium in Laguna Beach where the childless Olivia Garza lived with her two cats. One of the detectives reached up and tapped at the mobile, watching it spin and bounce.
“Interesting,” Olivia Garza said.
“Art,” Detective Harkness said.
“Yeah, that’s what they call it,” Detective Blake said.
“This is what got our responding deputy all worked up,” Detective Harkness said, waving his hand at the drawings, the collages, and the mobile, which didn’t bother him at all.
The intervention team had been called up just before dawn, roused from their beds, and in the full light of midmorning there was an everyday clarity to the situation that had eluded the first responders the night before.
“My theory: the nanny took them to Disneyland or something and got lost or delayed on the way back,” Detective Blake said.
“Yeah, they’re probably sleeping in a hotel someplace, dreaming about the apple pie they had for dinner last night,” Detective Harkness said.
“I predict, after the all-points,” Detective Blake said, “that they turn up around lunchtime.”
“Nah, earlier,” Detective Harkness said. “Ten, ten forty-five at the latest.”
“What do you think, Garza?”
She looked about the room, shuffled the papers and envelopes on Araceli’s table-desk, and finally said, “These parents have lied to me. And I don’t like it when people lie to me.”
“And how many years have you been in Child Protective Services?” Detective Harkness said.
“That’s what we do, Garza,” Detective Blake said. “We go places, and people lie to us. And then we catch them in their big lies, and we make them feel bad, and then they cry and tell us smaller lies.”
“I don’t like it when people lie and force me out of bed early,” Olivia Garza said. “And I don’t like it when they make me walk past the TV crews without having had a chance to put my makeup on.”
“You mean you can look even more beautiful than you do already?” Both detectives chuckled. “You’re funny, Garza.”
Olivia Garza brought her bad temper back to the living room, refusing to sit on the couch or at the table in the dining room, and decided to continue her self-consciously insolent pacing instead, as if daring the other members of the team to put up with her. After listening to Scott again recite, without much conviction, the story Maureen had first told the 911 operator, she addressed the parents for the first time.
“How much do you pay this woman?”
“Two hundred and fifty dollars a week,” Scott said.
“Under the table. Right?”
There was no answer, but Olivia Garza pressed ahead. “Do you leave your kids alone with her often?”
“No,” Maureen said, breaking a long silence. “We never have. Before. We had another person …”
“You’ve never left her alone