The Barbarian Nurseries A Novel - By Hector Tobar Page 0,123

with them and then you go away for two days and leave two boys with her?”

“That’s what they’ve been telling us,” interrupted the representative of the district attorney’s office, who was sitting on the sofa seat at a right angle from Maureen.

Olivia allowed the silence to stand there and make her point. The two detectives had been doing the same thing, off and on, for an hour, walking up the story to the parts that were not quite believable, and then stepping back because the representative of the DA’s office had placed himself next to Scott and Maureen and was, with his repeated words of support for the alleged victims, preventing the detectives from probing any further. Olivia Garza and the detectives both wondered the same thing: What are these people hiding? Something small and insignificant, Olivia Garza concluded, a fact not completely essential to the recovery of their children: some family embarrassment, or petty crime. Probably she and the detectives could pry the truth from this couple, but for the presence of the representative of the district attorney’s office, who was leaning forward in his seat, over the space where the coffee table used to stand. He was conspicuously overdressed in glossy Brooks Brothers sharkskin, and looked intently at Maureen and Scott, his clothes and demeanor suggesting a corporate-minded Catholic priest.

Ian Goller was the third-ranking member of the district attorney’s office and his official title was Senior Assistant District Attorney for Operations, but unofficially he was the district attorney’s fixer and protégé. Goller had mobilized the Endangered Child Emergency Intervention Team at 5:25 a.m., after sitting down to his morning news and coffee ritual, and seeing the faces of the boys flashing next to the words ORANGE COUNTY MISSING CHILDREN. Ian Goller was thirty-eight years old and, like Olivia Garza, he lived alone, though in a much more spacious condominium with a view of the harbor in Newport Beach. He had turned up the volume and heard the outline of the story, and in two deep breaths and two heartbeats he felt the great swell of popul ar indignation it might provoke. A nanny who was, more than likely, an illegal immigrant: absconding with two Orange County children with All-American looks. It would make the good people and voters of Orange County angrier than a dozen Mexican gangbanger murders, or twenty homicidal drunk drivers with Spanish surnames and no driver’s licenses, and, as such, it was precisely the sort of high-profile case for which the emergency-response team had been created.

Ian Goller was a native of the Orange County suburb of Fullerton who liked to tell people that his otherwise plain and unassuming hometown had once been home to the science fiction writer Philip K. Dick. “You know, Blade Runner?” Fullerton had produced no other greatness, as far as he knew, other than a perennially excellent college baseball team, and Goller himself was a graduate of San Diego State University and the middle-of-the-pack Chapman University School of Law. At the DA’s office he put in long hours, unlike many of his colleagues, and quickly worked his way up from traffic court and DUIs, his rise aided by a few idiosyncrasies that identified him as an Orange County local, and thus made him a favorite of the OC-born DA. Goller still allowed his blond hair to reach his collar, wore a braided leather Hawaiian surf bracelet over the French cuffs of his dress shirts, and in his youth had flirted with a career as a professional surfer—which had led to a recent profile in California Lawyer as “the surfing prosecutor.”

Now, sitting with these two parents in their well-appointed living room in the Laguna Rancho Estates, he could see that he was in the presence of an Orange County mother who cared. He could feel it in the dust-free air, the good and life-giving scent of the nearby ocean, in the baby dictionaries and well-worn swing set, and see it in the way she stroked her baby girl’s back, as if to comfort the child when she was really comforting herself. As he contemplated the fate of the boys this OC mom had left in the care of a Mexican nanny, Goller saw everything that was at once satisfying and frustrating about being a prosecutor.

Protecting children and prosecuting abuse was the purest thing a lawyer could do: the victims were sinless, and the defendants were invariably transparent scumbags, convicted by juries with great speed and relish. And in the suspect’s copper-tinged face