The only way to get close enough to ask it is to show up unannounced. "They didn't let me in the house--not that I blame them," she recalls. "The father just cried for fifteen minutes straight. The stepmother was in my face. It was the first time I have ever been called"--she takes a deep breath--"a fucking Mexican. I had such sympathy for them. I still do."
Garcia would rather be yelled at by someone's distraught family member than a judge any day. "These people are only letting off steam. I let 'em. Then I start in with the questions."
Years ago, while still working exclusively for Weld County, Garcia did this so successfully with a twelve-year-old witness in a sex-abuse case that her boss, Bryan Shaha, used the taped transcript as a training tool for other investigators.
"This was at a time when there were so-called experts saying 'Always believe the children,'" Shaha says, remembering that Garcia's interview helped the witness decide she originally might have made an accusation that was anything but believable. She would never, he thinks, have confessed such a thing to a less sympathetic investigator. "No, Maria was patient and empathetic and allowed this person to say what she needed to say," he recalls. "She takes it to a higher level."
Garcia left that job in 1992 to put in two years doing federal investigations in Las Vegas ("A lot of bank robberies. Whew") before returning to Denver to start her own company. With her sister, Josie Herrera, as a partner/operative handling Greeley-area cases and her younger daughter, Monica Delgado, taking care of secretarial chores, Garcia now maintains two home offices while continuing to spend most of her time on the street.
"I even have a few rich private clients now," she says. "And all those problems poor people have? Rich people have them, too, except they're a little bit more demanding. As a matter of fact, give me indigents any day."
Her further preferences: murders and assaults. "Even though they are so draining, emotionally and physically," Garcia says, "each case is like a novel. The best part is finding out about them. Not just in court, but who they are and what they think."
This afternoon she will open up an ER doctor, a lawyer, a writer, and a client who landed in jail last night, as well as several other people. Tomorrow she will be back knocking on a door and inquiring of whatever furtive person answers it whether she might, perhaps, ask a few questions.
"What can they say to me other than yes or no?" she muses. "If it's no, I might say, 'I understand. You're upset and angry, but if you would please understand I'm only an investigator, and we might only know what the police are saying you said, and perhaps you would like to tell us what you said, and I only want to find out where you're coming from.'"
After that, nine times out of ten, Maria Garcia and her quarry will sit down at the kitchen table.
Then they will talk.
