“Mr. Schmidt?” Maggie called. They splashed out of the water toward the boat landing.
He stopped with his hands on his hips. “That’s me,” he replied gruffly. “Who are you?”
Maggie introduced herself and Serena. “We’d like to take five minutes to talk about an old case of yours,” she said.
“Which case?”
“Inger Mathisen.”
Schmidt folded his sunglasses and shoved them into the pocket of his swimsuit. “I wondered if that one would ever come back and bite me in the ass.” He sighed and added, “Let me get the boat out, then we’ll talk.”
Ten minutes later, the boat was dripping in the parking lot, and Schmidt sat opposite Maggie and Serena on the park bench. His bushy hair was damp, and they smelled beer on his breath.
Serena angled her head toward the water. “How’d you do?”
“Finished off a six-pack, took a swim, didn’t catch a damn thing. Typical day. Tell you the truth, I don’t like fish much. Never have. Most of the time, I just throw them back, because otherwise my wife would want to cook them.”
“Nice place to retire,” Maggie said.
“Yeah, it’s not so bad, huh? We’ve got a trailer in Texas where we go during the winter. I’d stick around here if it were up to me, but my wife hates snow.”
“Tell us about the Mathisen case,” Serena said.
“Not much to tell. Isolated farm. Saturday night. Woman was asleep in bed. Somebody bludgeoned her to death.”
“You never caught the guy?”
Schmidt shook his head. “Nah, we had nothing. Figured it was some bastard who got off the interstate and was looking for cash. Probably surprised to find anybody in the house.”
“The farm was five miles off the freeway,” Serena said. “And not easy to find.”
Schmidt shrugged and chewed on a fingernail.
“Did you find reports of any similar incidents along the interstate route?” Maggie asked. “Maybe out of Montana or Minnesota? You can usually track these guys like pins on a map.”
“There were no other incidents that looked like a pattern crime,” Schmidt said. “We figured the guy got spooked.”
“Any sign of forced entry?” Serena asked.
“Out here? Nobody locks their doors.”
“Did anyone see or hear anything?” Serena asked.
“You saw the place. Not a neighbor for miles.”
“What about the boy?”
Schmidt rubbed his mustache. “Boy?”
“Finn Mathisen. Inger’s son.”
“He wasn’t home.”
Maggie leaned across the park bench. “No offense, Mr. Schmidt, but you’re not a farmer, so why don’t you quit shoveling the shit?”
Schmidt’s mustache twitched as he grinned. “I like you. Never much liked Orientals, but you’re smart. Easy on the eyes, too. You both are.”
“Why’d you think this case would bite you in the ass?” Maggie asked.
Schmidt glanced at his truck, and Serena thought he wanted to be home eating dinner. “Look, ladies, why cause problems for good people after so many years? Who the hell cares?”
“A few years after Inger was killed, a teenage girl was murdered in Duluth,” Serena said. “She was beaten with a baseball bat. Finn is a suspect.”
Schmidt frowned. “Well, shit.”
“So you want to give us the real story?”
“Hey, there was no evidence to prove that an intruder didn’t kill her.”
“But you didn’t believe it.”
Schmidt jabbed a calloused finger at them. “Sometimes you have to decide whether you’re a cop or a human being, okay? Maybe it’s not that way in the big city, but it sure as hell works like that in a small town. The way I figure, Inger Mathisen’s murder was an act of mercy.”
“What do you mean by that?” Maggie asked.
“Inger was a mean fucking bitch. Why do you think her husband got drunk every night and finally wound up on the business end of a semi? He hated being in that house. He was weak. He didn’t stop it.”
“Stop what?”
Schmidt sighed with disgust. “The word in town was that Inger did stuff to her kids,” Schmidt said. “Sick stuff. Back then, you knew about that kind of thing, but you didn’t talk about it. A lot of fucked-up kids came out of those farms.”
“Go on.”
Schmidt coughed and spit on the ground. “The boy, Finn, was fourteen or fifteen. Already messed up. Into drugs. The way we figure it, he got stoned and decided he was done with his mother once and for all. It was his bat. His fingerprints were on it.”
“You said he wasn’t home,” Serena said.
“That’s what his sister told us.”
“Rikke?”
Schmidt nodded. “She got out of that hellhole when she went off to NDSU and got her teaching license. She was working in Fargo and living in an apartment there. She swore that Finn was with her that weekend.”
“Were there any witnesses near her apartment to back that up?”
“A couple people remembered seeing the boy,” he said. “They couldn’t be sure if it was Saturday or Sunday.”
“You think it was Sunday,” Maggie said.
“Yeah, I figure Finn killed Inger on Saturday night and then called his sister. She came out to get him and take him back to Fargo to sober him up and get their stories straight. No one saw a thing, though, so there was no way we could prove it. Rikke took Finn home on Tuesday, and that’s when they claim they found the body smelling up the house. She called us, and I came over.”
“Did you interrogate them?”
“Interrogate kids whose mother had just been killed? Yeah, not so much.”