“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.

“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.”