Influence

Chapter 12 - pt. 1

It took Maris Garcia a moment to realize her partner was talking to her.

"Are you going to stay in your own head," he said, snapping his fingers, "or can we pretend for a moment that we both want the same thing here?"

She stared at the scribbles on her clipboard. "Just working out a few scenarios in my mind. I didn't mean to space out on you."

Ryan leaned back in his chair. The precinct had not only made them partners but desk buddies, as though they were first graders. This meant Ryan's meticulously organized desk abutted her nearly as tidy workspace. That was one thing they had in common—a sense of order, the importance of maintaining structure. A place for everything and everything in its place, like her grandfather had taught her when he demonstrated where all his tools were to be kept. She and Ryan agreed on organization, but not on a whole lot else.

"What was going on back there?"

She wiggled her pen between her fingers, watching as the movement made the illusion that it was bending—another trick her granddad had shown her.

"What do you mean?" She knew what he meant and so she asked the question with a gruffness she hadn't intended. She'd been bad cop. She hated the good cop bad cop dichotomy, yet she'd fallen right into it and now couldn't muster up the energy to feel guilty about it.

"Tam Martin. You were two minutes away from demanding she tell you the truth or you'd curse her firstborn with the head of a turkey."

"That's an exaggeration."

"Is it though?" He took a disinfecting wipe out of a canister that sat atop the narrow crevice formed between their two desks. She made a mental note to grab more from the supply closet as he began wiping down his keyboard.

"You're usually so collected during an interview," He said. "Detached. Not this time. Something's eating you about this case, and I gotta ask—don't get mad—is it because she's a celebrity? You don't strike me as a Goldie Girl." He tossed the wipe into the wastepaper basket they also shared. "You watching makeup tutorials on your off time?"

"You know me better than that." Too well, maybe. But he was wrong about her motivations regarding Goldie. "Yes, you're right. Something is getting to me. Something doesn't add up and an innocent woman is dead."

"Is she innocent though? I mean, I'm not saying she deserved to be pushed off a ledge, but it doesn't mean she wasn't involved in something shady. Something that may have led to her demise. By the looks of it, she had at least one enemy."

"Or the opposite of an enemy. An obsessed fan?"

"Both are angles that we'll need to explore."

"Fine. But here's the thing, Ryan. While you're accusing me of going at this witness hot, you had your own weird take."

"How's that?"

"You made her question if we were viewing this as a suicide," she said. "Forensics already ruled that out."

"I wanted to see how she'd react. I'm learning her tell."

"What tell is that exactly, that she gets pissed off when we lie to her?"

"She hid her hands the whole time. Why do you think that is?"

"So she wouldn't be tempted to flip us off?"

"She was trying to hide her nerves."

"See? She's keeping something from us."

"Maybe." He scrolled through something on his phone, then shut it off. "But it's normal to feel nervous after your boss is murdered and you spend the night at a police station getting grilled. You increased her anxiety. That's not normal. Normally you put people at ease and milk the truth from them."