“You could, but I hope enough time has passed that you now believe again what you believed as a boy. I didn’t kill anyone. Wisdom comes with innocence and experience, Lieutenant, and it’s only the in-between time that causes us problems.”
Jones sat down on the opposite row of chairs and laid his fists on his knees. Stride took an unopened bottle of spring water by the cap from the seat next to him. He handed it to Jones, who grabbed it in his big hand.
“You must be dry after your flight,” Stride said.
“In fact, I am.” Jones undid the cap and drank down half the bottle. He recapped it and then said, “May I keep this until I finish it, or would you like your fingerprint sample back right now?”
Stride actually felt himself blushing. “Keep it,” he snapped.
Jones grinned and put the bottle on the floor.
“Why contact me after so long?” Stride asked. “Do you know about Tish Verdure and the book she’s writing about the murder?”
“I still have friends in the Rasta community,” Jones explained. “As you know, there was an article in the Duluth paper recently that rehashed the crime and mentioned that a Rasta vagrant was a suspect. It made the rounds on our Web sites, and someone finally sent me the article with a note that said, ‘Was this you?’ ”
“But why come forward now? I assumed you were dead. You were safe.”
“I thought long and hard, believe me, but I decided it was time to put that part of the past behind me. I confess I was also a little curious about you. The article mentioned that you were a Duluth detective, and I was surprised to find out that you were the same boy I confronted that night.”
“I looked up Dandelion Men on the Web,” Stride said. “You didn’t mention what happened to you in Duluth.”
Jones eased back into the chair. His girth filled the space, and his waist squeezed against the armrests. “Oh, I wanted to talk about Duluth, but I knew that people were still looking for me. It’s like being a bear loose in the city streets. They don’t just put it in a cage when they find it. They shoot it dead.”
“The cop who shot at you back then,” Stride said. “He was dirty. I thought you should know.”
“That was a dirty time.”
“Why did you choose that life?” Stride asked. “Why be a drifter?”
“I guess you could say I was appalled by modern life,” Jones said. “I felt disconnected. Only a boy can be quite so naive. Still, the community I found in the shadows was deeper and stronger than any I have found since. It was hard to leave it behind. Every now and then, I try to find the dandelion men again, but they’re an endangered species. Like feral animals whose habitat has been destroyed. They scamper away when I come close. I’m no longer from their world, you see.”
“You sound like you miss it,” Stride said.
Jones tugged at the lapels on his suit with a bemused smile. “I do. Sometimes I fantasize about disappearing again. It’s only a fantasy.”
“Tell me about Laura.”
“Laura?”
“The girl who was murdered.”
Jones folded his hands over his chest. “Yes, of course. I never knew her name until I saw that newspaper article. She was just a girl in the park.”
“All these years, I thought you killed her,” Stride said.
Jones nodded. “And now?”
“Now I’m not so sure. We have a new witness. Someone who says you rescued Laura instead of attacking her.”
“A witness,” Jones said. “Yes, someone else was in the woods that night. I never saw him, but I knew he was there. I smelled the cannabis he was smoking.”
Finn, Stride thought.
“There was another boy in the softball field,” Jones added. “He was the one who attacked Laura. I stopped him from harming her.”
Stride nodded. “After the fight, Laura ran toward the north beach.”
“Yes, I know. I followed her.”
“Did you go all the way to the beach? Did you see her there?”
“I did,” Dada said.
“What did you see?”
Dada smiled. “I already told you, Lieutenant. That girl had secrets.”
33
We’re never going to make it back to Minnesota tonight,” Maggie said.
They were an hour west of Fargo, seated on top of a park bench overlooking a boat launch that dipped into the waters of Lake Ashtabula. Immediately to their left was the concrete wall of the Baldhill Dam, which held back the Sheyenne River and created a narrow stretch of man-made lake. It was late afternoon. The air smelled of boat fuel and hamburgers. Jet Ski riders left wakes in the water. Nearby, in the camping area, children splashed and squealed along a strip of sand beach.
“Peter wants his plane back,” Serena replied.
“Yeah, but this guy could be out there fishing until the sun goes down.”
After leaving the Mathisen farm, they had stopped at police headquarters in Fargo, where their North Dakota colleagues helped them identify the man who had served as lead detective investigating the murder of Finn’s mother, Inger Mathisen. The detective, Oscar Schmidt, had retired from the force more than a decade earlier and relocated with his wife to a town called Valley City. Serena and Maggie tracked down the Schmidt home, where his wife pointed them north to Lake Ashtabula, Oscar’s favorite spot for fishing.
“You want to go in the water?” Serena asked.
Maggie tented her sunglasses and squinted at the park. “You mean skinny-dipping?”
“I mean it’s hot. Let’s roll up our pants and dip our feet.”
“You’re on.”
They left their shoes on top of the bench and folded the legs of their jeans above their calves. The sand on the beach was scorching, but the lake was cold when they stuck in their toes. They shuffled a few feet out until they were standing in eight inches of water.
“So is it a coincidence?” Serena asked. “Finn’s mother was beaten to death? Just like Laura?”
“No.”
“Do you believe the intruder story?”
“No.”
“Neither do I. I wonder why Oscar did.”
“That’s what we’ll ask him. Assuming he ever gets in off the lake.”
Serena lifted her chin toward the warm sun. Maggie finished a can of Diet Coke while they waited, checking her watch impatiently as half an hour passed. Finally, a fifteen-foot aluminum boat that had obviously seen many years of service put-putted toward the boat landing. At the stern, an old man with shaggy gray hair and a mustache that curled over his upper lip cut off the Evinrude motor and let the boat drift into the shallow water. He wore navy blue swimming trunks with white vertical stripes and was shirtless. His belly bulged like a basketball, but the rest of his skin was loose and leathery. He was small, no more than five feet five, and wore sunglasses. As Serena and Maggie watched, Oscar Schmidt climbed into the water, dragged the prow until it was nearly beached on the concrete ramp, and then tramped toward his red Chevy truck in flip-flops.