by the small comedy he had been drawn into. After a month in which he had crossed paths with a Taiwanese child-smuggling ring and a meth-addict grandmother whose idea of discipline was a lighted cigarette, and after three trips with preschoolers to emergency rooms for examinations and photograph sessions for that grim and perverse task known as evidence collection, he was more annoyed than relieved by the harmless stupidity of this case. There was no crime here to investigate, but there were others awaiting him. Serious shit follows bullshit—it always works that way. A few seconds later, he rose to his feet and left the interrogation room, with the assistant district attorney following behind him, and they began an argument that continued during the twenty minutes it took them to drive back to Paseo Linda Bonita.
Deputy Castillo escorted Araceli to the holding cell, where she had three hours alone to study the art on the walls, which consisted of five representations of a unicorn with bulbous legs, three crucifixes tipped with arrowheads, and an exquisite rosebud, all drawn in pencil lines that had faded into ghost images in a fog of glossy, waterproof yellow paint. She thought she might ask one of the guards to lend her a writing instrument, because once they did set her free her time would be her own again, forever, and why not use this time to get started? Perhaps she would add a Picasso bull or an El Greco horse to the gallery.
“Sir, a pencil, please, is it possible?” she asked Deputy Castillo when he returned. Unexpectedly, he unlocked the door and held it open.
The news-aggregator website kept a flashing police-car light on its home page, along with a series of rapidly rewritten headlines, as the news of Brandon and Keenan’s alleged kidnapping and rescue unfolded, scoring three-point-four million “hits” over the course of the first three hours, with the traffic doubling for the next two hours, when the site linked to footage obtained by an ABC news affiliate: forty-five seconds of Araceli running and being tackled by a police officer, as captured by the film crew in Huntington Park, and sold by the director for one thousand dollars—worth two days of on-location catering, the director would later tell his friends. Soon the footage began circulating on national cable shows, and by midafternoon assignment editors and managing editors across Southern California were dispatching a battalion of wise-ass reporters to stake out the south county sheriff’s station and Paseo Linda Bonita.
At the front gate of the Laguna Rancho Estates, the guards let through anyone carrying the Day-Glo-green rectangle of a laminated plastic press card issued by the sheriff’s department. Outside the Paseo Linda Bonita home the reporters pestered the sheriff’s department patrolmen and lower-l evel public information officials on the perimeter for details of the boys’ “drama,” and set up tripods and light reflectors on the lawn. A second media cluster laid siege to the Luján family home in Huntington Park, where the councilman had sealed all the doors and windows, leaving the reporters to hound the neighbors for some throw-away speculation about possible kidnappings and flights to the border.
“Police sources say that Councilman Sal Luján is not a suspect in the case,” went the report on KFWB all-news radio, delivered by a baritone-voiced veteran of riots, celebrity trials, and airplane crashes, big and small, a macho reporter-gumshoe who was on a first-name basis with mid- and high-ranking police officials in most of the dozens of jurisdictions in Los Angeles and Orange counties. “Seems he’s just a Good Samaritan who got caught up in the drama of the two boys. But authorities say they’re still trying to figure out what this lady Araceli No-eh-my Ramirez was up to. But, once again, the children she absconded with are said to be safe … Reporting from Huntington Park, this is Pete …”
The case was a “troubling mystery,” said the NBC television affiliate reporter, a portrait of gray-haired youthfulness well known to Southern Californians for the calm urgency of his reporting on the edge of brush fires, mudslides, and assorted gangland crime scenes. “We really don’t know what shape those boys are in or what they went through. We don’t know if this Mexican nanny will be charged with anything. We don’t know what, exactly, her intentions were,” the reporter said, summarizing all he didn’t know when his affiliate patched him into the network’s national cable feed. For several hours the repeated transmissions of Araceli’s blurred backyard photograph