The Barbarian Nurseries A Novel - By Hector Tobar Page 0,134
I don’t know what is.”
“Felony two seventy-three-A?” Detective Blake said. “I don’t see it. Misdemeanor two seventy-three-A? Maybe.”
“Do we go back and question the parents again?” Olivia Garza asked.
“We’ve got their statement,” Goller said.
“Can’t we just drop the whole thing?” Jennifer Gelfand-Peña asked.
There was a collective silence in which the three senior members of the emergency intervention team—Goller, Blake, and Garza—looked at one another and waited like pistoleros in a western for one to blink. The truth was, once you amassed as many resources as they had, it took a bit of courage to simply cry out, Sorry! False Alarm! After all, K-9 units had been assembled to search the hills, Explorer deputies had marched through the meadows, and a suspect had been named, with her alleged crime denounced. They had called an Amber Alert and semi-sealed-off the border for a few hours, all in the name of protecting two Orange County children. Some grown-up had to be held responsible for this mess.
“From what I can tell,” Goller said finally, “and from what I can see of this family, and from having questioned this woman, I think it’s pretty obvious Ms. Ramirez didn’t like her employers. So she conspired to dump their kids someplace. Just leave ‘em somewhere god-awful. If she ‘willfully’ placed those boys in a situation where they might be endangered, then that’s two seventy-three-A. That’s the law.”
Detective Blake was unconvinced. He sensed familiar political-theatric motives at work, the usual DA baloney. “Well, you go ahead and make your phone call, Mr. Goller. And I’ll make mine.”
“You know Goller, sometimes things really are what they seem to be,” Olivia Garza said. “It’s pretty obvious we should just call it a ten-forty and go home.”
“No, I don’t think that I’ll be able to do that,” the assistant district attorney said, raising his chin and directing the group to look up at the sky and its spreading wash of ultramarine ink. The beating engines of two television hel icopters had slipped into the airspace above them as they were debating the case. “They pulled those choppers away from the fire to cover this,” Goller said. “That’s huge. My guess is that we’re live on national cable right now.” The assistant district attorney allowed the members of the emergency intervention team to ponder the meaning of the hovering crafts, and the small globes attached to their undercarriages. “Unfortunately, we’re in America’s living room now,” he said. “Therefore, we must proceed with an abundance of caution.”
They were smack in the middle of that great spectacle Goller had foreseen in his condo during the first hours of the morning, when Brandon’s and Keenan’s faces first flashed on his television. And already he sensed where its pressures might take them.
“So go ahead and release your suspect if you have to, Detective,” Goller said. “But in a few days you might have to pick her up again.”
After a first kiss of his daughter’s forehead, after looking at his two sons, embracing them, and confirming, with a scan of his eyes and a few minutes in their untroubled presence, that they had suffered no harm, Scott found himself stepping back and away. “We missed you, Dad,” Keenan said, and the simple statement brought a rush of water to his eyes. He turned to his wife, seeking a glance, a shared moment of understanding and forgiveness, but she was aggressively not looking at him, so he drifted off into a state of shocked silence, in which he listened to his wife repeat, again and again, “Are you okay? Are you okay?” Then, after the police and the social workers and the psychologist had finished their “talk” alone with Brandon and Keenan, and after he and Maureen had a second reunion with their sons that was a shorter and less emotional version of the first, he drifted away from the room entirely, leaving his wife to assuage her guilt by reading to the boys and Samantha from a large picture book, in a kind of forced imitation of domestic bliss that, Scott guessed, was intended for the police and social services officials still huddled in their yard. Scott looked at Brandon rolling his eyes because Ladybug Girl was not exactly his idea of compelling literature. My son is eleven, but he’s already a book snob. Eventually Scott drifted to the television room, to the high-tech masculinity of objects plugged into the wall, and reached for the television’s power switch with a Pavlovian purposelessness, flipping through the cable channels.