When Maris Garcia was a little girl, she'd wanted to be an artist. Not the kind with paintings in museums or fancy galleries, as she never experienced those sorts of places firsthand. The artists she was familiar with painted caricatures of tourists down by the wharfs. Her grandparents indulged her by letting her sit for a portrait after taking her to the aquarium on a warm day one July. A man who seemed ancient to her at the time but who was probably in his mid-fifties joked about chorizos and the Seahawks with her grandfather as he painted a seven-year-old Maris.
Maris squirmed while sitting in front of his easel, the Puget Sound and a contingency of pigeons in the background. The scents of salty air and salty pretzels from a nearby food cart stung her nose. When it was over, her grandparents paid the artist and Maris held up her portrait. A giant headed girl with long brown pigtails smiled up at her, toothy grin ready to bite into the hot pretzel she held in her tiny hand.
"Can I have a pretzel?" She asked her grandparents.
Maris didn't remember if they'd let her have one, but she did remember the feeling that art, even goofy caricatures, could affect you, make you want things you hadn't known you wanted. It had manipulated her, and she'd been fine with that the same way a commercial for sugary cereal made her want Fruit Loops.
She stuck with the artistic ambitions for two years, drawing the oversized, misshapen heads of everyone in her family, all of them holding whatever she'd deemed their favorite foods to be.
When she was nine, Maris drew her very last caricature. She sat in her cramped living room, crocheted linen doilies her grandmother crafted decades ago covering the fraying fabric on the sofa's arms. The subject of her current artwork, a man with a thick goatee, sat across from her in the brown recliner usually reserved for her grandfather.
As she drew, the man asked her questions. His voice managed to sound hoarse and gentle at the same time, like someone who loved to sing but was rather awful at it.
"Do you remember hearing a noise last night."
She used her darkest tinted pencil for the man's hair. The noise had woken her up. Of course, she remembered. She nodded.
"What did you do then?"
The man smelled like tobacco, something her grandfather would disapprove of. The whole chair would have to be sprayed down with Febreze to get out the stench. Maris drew a cigarette in the man's hand. She switched to grey and made a swirling cloud of smoke extending from it up to the top edge of the page. "I looked for Oma and Papa, but I couldn't find them."
The man leaned forward. He smelled bad but there was a softness in his expression. His brown eyes reminded her of Tommy, her pet golden retriever who'd gotten hit by a truck last year. Those eyes pleaded with her, like she might have a bone-shaped biscuit to offer him. "Not in their bedroom, no... but then did you go downstairs?"
Maris nodded. She gave the man a blue hat even though he wasn't wearing one. It suited him. "They weren't down there either."
The man sat back, paused, frowned. She hadn't said what he wanted to hear. "This is difficult, Maris. We are trying to understand what happened. It's very important that we figure this out. Maybe you know something you don't remember that you know. We want to help your grandparents."
Maris echoed the man's frown with one of her own. Her uncle had told her only Jesus could help her grandparents now. She couldn't understand why he'd said that like it was a bad thing. Didn't he want Jesus to help them?
Maris glanced behind the man through the open archway to the dining room. The kitchen was to the left of that room, but Maris wasn't allowed to go in there anymore.
"What happened when you reached the kitchen, Maris?"
She colored in the man's striped tie and then signed her name in the lower right corner, the way the real artists did. She tore the caricature out of her sketch pad and handed it to him.
"Wow!" He examined it with wide eyes. "How did you know I smoked?"
"You smell like you smoke. I added the hat because I bet you wear one like that sometimes."
He chuckled. "You'd make a great police detective. Too bad I'm not in the market for a partner. I'd hire you in a second!" The smile faded and his eyes became sad again. She had given him a treat, but not the one he'd wanted. "Tell me about going into the kitchen that night. After you heard the noise."
Maris took her artwork and dangled it in front of him. "If you want to keep this, it will cost you twenty dollars."
The man, who she later learned was named Detective Hubert, visited Maris several times after she'd moved into her uncle's house and again a year later, shortly before her mother returned from deployment and took Maris to live in San Diego. He slowly milked information from her and she learned to appreciate his kindness.
"The truth matters to me," he told her often. "If it mattered to everyone, the world would be a better place."
The truth didn't matter to the person who'd murdered her grandparents, however. As kind as Detective Hubert was, he never managed to solve their case. Maris set aside her colored pencils and dedicated herself to the pursuit of a more profound truth than what could be found in a "my favorite thing" caricature. By age ten, she'd decided she could do better than the cops who'd infiltrated her life.
Twenty years later, Maris was no longer so sure. The day had lasted longer than most. She'd been on the clock around the clock. Exhaustion hit her in between espresso shots. The dark splotches below Ryan's eyes indicated he wasn't fairing much better.
"We're going to have to call it a day soon, Maris." Ryan said after returning from the breakroom to collect his empty meal containers. "My kids are going to want to wrestle with me as soon as I walk in the door. If I don't show up for work in the morning, it's because they've done in their old man."
"So, you are going right home then?" She caught the accusatory tone in her voice a beat too late to prevent it.
"Get off my case, Maris."
"I'm sorry. I shouldn't have said it like that."
"It was one time."
"Of course, it was. I said I'm sorry."
"This is a high-stress job. Then throw twin boys into the mix. It's fucking hell some days. And don't assume you know everything about everything. You might be a good detective, but you're not my marriage therapist. And you're definitely not an authority on what constitutes a healthy relationship."
Maris shut down her laptop, slid it into its bag and draped its strap over her shoulder. "Now who's being the asshole."
A long sigh followed by a few bars of pitch perfect humming. Detective Zachary Ryan's signature attempt at clearing the air. "Let's agree that sleep deprivation has won its battle against both of us tonight. Fresh start in the morning?"
He wasn't taking blame, then, but also not issuing any to her. Keep the peace, let it go, move on.
"Every day brings a new opportunity, right?" Meaningless words that Ryan would take as a sign a truce had been reached. She pressed her tongue against the back of her front teeth fighting the urge to scream. The dead didn't get fresh starts or new opportunities. Hell, outside of platitudes, they were hard to come by for living people too.
"Yep. And our new opportunity tomorrow will be interviewing the brother."
"Stepbrother." Jasper DeAngelis had given a brief statement last night, but they had more they wanted to ask him. After attempts to reach him most of the day had failed, he'd finally called her an hour ago asking if he could come in to talk in the morning. He wouldn't give specifics.
Jasper didn't remember her. Then again, he was half in the bag when they'd spoken. A clear-headed, sober Jasper might recall more. She couldn't decide if that was a good thing.
At home with a bottle of wine and her laptop in front of her, Maris scrolled through posts about her murder victim. Goldie surrounded by friends at a trendy restaurant on her last birthday, Goldie with her dog, Goldie sporting the flashy masks she'd marketed during the pandemic. Even with the lower half of her face covered, she shone. She searched for pictures of Goldie's mystery lover, but it could have been any number of people. She had a way of making anyone near her feel special. No one stood out as extra significant because each person hugging and smiling next to her was significant to Goldie.
After she'd tortured herself and finished most of the bottle, she closed the laptop, Goldie's warm eyes disappearing into folds of plastic and metal. Tomorrow, something would come to light. Jasper and Tam Martin didn't get along, but Jasper had intimate knowledge of her relationship with Goldie. Maybe he'd found something out today that made him suspect her. Whatever it was, Maris would figure it out tomorrow.
Jasper. Tam hated him and Goldie loved him. She wondered, as she often had before, how deep the affection between them went.
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A little backstory for our detective, and for me as well.... I set her childhood in Seattle because I live Washington state. I know exactly what our young Maris was seeing as she sat for the caricature artist at the waterfront.
Does Maris have the drive, based on her past, to find Goldie's killer, or will she let presumptions get in the way of seeking the truth?
Thanks once again for reading and supporting my story!