Killing Britney Read online

  Throwing Ricky’s letter jacket over the arm of the rocking chair—another legacy from her mother’s pioneer ancestors—Britney sighed. “Well, that was fun,” she said, hoping her sarcasm would captivate Adam’s attention.

  He ignored her.

  “How was the rest of Alias?” she asked.

  He shrugged. He didn’t even look at her.

  “Where’s my dad?” she asked, noticing the time.

  She flopped into the rocking chair and let out another long sigh.

  They watched TV together for a while. It was a funny episode, but Britney wasn’t in the mood for laughter. She could barely pay attention, actually. Her mind kept wandering back to Bobby Plumley and the pleading, wounded look he’d given her before she turned away from him. It was spooky. She didn’t think she was paranoid.

  Adam’s mood seemed equally sour. On the TV, he watched Red yell and scream and Eric simper without even cracking a smile.

  After twenty minutes or so of this, Britney finally tried again. “It’s eleven o’clock. Don’t you think my dad should be home by now?”

  “I don’t know? Should he?”

  Well, this was a start. Communication, however cursory and combative, was better than silence.

  Britney’s father sometimes worked on Sundays but never this late. Given the events of the day, she was worried. He was so trusting. This made him such a good defense attorney—his willingness to believe his clients were innocent despite any and all evidence to the contrary—but it also meant that he was capable of stumbling into danger without realizing it until it was too late. She hoped nothing bad had happened to him. When she’d spoken to him after the chaos of the park, he’d said he was at the office. But now that she thought about it, there was maybe too much background noise—shouting voices, muffled music—for him to have been telling the truth.

  She called him again now, but she got his voice mail—his phone didn’t even ring. He must have turned it off.

  “I’m serious, Adam. Do you know where my dad is? He’s not answering his phone.” She didn’t say what she was actually thinking, that maybe whoever was after her—Bobby, obviously Bobby—might have gotten to him on his way home.

  “Maybe you should put one of those house arrest doohickeys around his ankle,” Adam said.

  “You don’t have to be like that.”

  Striding to the window, she searched up and down the street for some sign of him. “Really, don’t you think it’s weird that he’s not home yet?”

  The wind whipped snow in long hissing arcs up and over the drifts that had built up along the plowed street. Where could he be?

  Adam struggled to his feet and joined her at the window. He gazed out with her for a while.

  She felt something on her shoulder, not the one near Adam, but the other one, a tapping, like the long finger of death coming for her. She shrieked—“What’s that?”—and spun, but no one was there.

  Adam chuckled.

  She could have killed him.

  “Don’t do that. I thought you were—”

  “Who? Bobby Plumley?”

  She slapped him. She actually slapped him! She couldn’t remember ever slapping a boy before in her life.

  He grinned that mischievous grin of his and said, “Okay, you need to relax. And get a sense of humor.”

  His eyes lingered, waiting for a sign from her. They twinkled, and she felt like she was discovering something about his personality. In a weird way, he was trying to cheer her up.

  She didn’t know why, but she suddenly felt terribly happy to have Adam around. She burst into laughter, surprising herself as much as she surprised him.

  “I didn’t know that one worked on anybody anymore,” he said. He was laughing as well.

  Once they’d calmed down, the two of them returned to their morbid gazing out of the window. Britney contemplated telling Adam about her evening for a moment. Then she thought better of it.

  “I think it’s weird,” she said. “It’s making me worried.”

  “Anyway,” Adam said, “it doesn’t look like he’s coming right now.” He wandered back to the couch and poised tensely on the edge, returning his attention to the TV, which was now showing a rerun of Everybody Loves Raymond.

  Britney came and sat next to him. She was tense too.

  They watched the show in absolute silence, and when it was over, they watched the old episode of Seinfeld that followed it.

  When they heard the car turn into the driveway, they both jumped.

  “Oh, thank God,” Britney said.

  She zapped off the TV.

  Her father was drunk. She could tell by the way he tried to control his posture and carefully place his feet every time he took a step—by how hard he was trying to act like he was sober. Seeing Britney and Adam’s expectant gazes, he stopped in the archway that opened into the living room and blinked at them, his eyelids at half-mast. His London Fog trench coat was folded over his arm, his briefcase in his hand. Without really noticing what he was doing, he dropped them where he stood and entered the room. He didn’t stumble or lurch—he was a dignified drunk. But Britney knew the signs. In the months immediately following her mother’s death, she’d seen him like this more times than she wanted to remember.

  “So,” he said, “Britney, did you talk to the detective?” His voice took soft curves around the hard consonants.

  Adam turned to Britney. “You talked to the detective? About what? About Bobby? I told you, I scared him off.” He looked wounded and slightly alarmed.

  Choosing to ignore both of their questions, Britney couldn’t hide her agitation when she asked her father, “Where have you been? I was scared to death!”

  The three off them spoke over and through one another. Mr. Johnson pressed her to find out how her conversation with the detective had gone. Adam complained about her having gone to the detective at all. Their voices were raised. Not so much in anger as in concurrent crosscurrents of anxiety.

  To Britney, it felt like the conversation with Detective Russell had taken place ages ago. What was important was finding out what was going on with her father, but the two of them were pressing her too hard for her to get the answers to her own questions.

  “Shut up! Okay? Just shut up!” she said finally. “Look, I’m not going to tell you what we talked about, okay? It’s private. But Dad, you were right. I feel better now that I saw her. She’s a very nice woman. Let’s leave it at that. And Adam, if Bobby’s in trouble—and I’m not saying he is—it’s not your concern. Okay? I’m sure he deserves whatever’s coming to him.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” Adam asked. “Are you going to get him arrested? Because of what I told you? I don’t think you need to do that. He’s just a weird, lonely guy.”

  She spun on him, enraged. “Don’t tell me you’re going to stick up for him now all of a sudden.”

  “I’m not sticking up for him. I just think that, you know, people change.”

  This was all too much. Britney could feel the rage welling inside her. She turned her back on Adam—it was either that or revisit the scene at the Sanctuary. She focused her attention back on her father, who had fallen out and lost track of the conversation. He was sitting in the wing chair, his whole body slack, staring off into the indefinite distance.

  “So where were you?” she said again, her voice quivering.

  He startled. It took him a moment to fully comprehend her question.

  “I was supposed to meet Karl,” he said slowly. He sounded exhausted and extremely sad. “We were going to get a quick beer at Capital Brewery. I was going to buy him dinner. I wanted to hear how his new job was going and go over some stuff with him—”

  Britney cut him off. “What stuff?”

  “Just some stuff about his case. Some stuff I’ve discovered. I had a few questions for him.” Through the drunken glaze in his eyes lurked a profound disappointment—with what, Britney didn’t know. “He stood me up, though. We’d said eight-thirty. Wh
at time did you call me? A little after nine, right? And he still hadn’t arrived. I waited for, I don’t know, three or four hours. Until just now. I guess I got a little looped. I … He said he had changed. The way he used to be, he was capable of anything. He was always on the verge of getting himself in some really ugly situations. I wanted to believe he had changed. I thought he had changed….” Trailing off, Mr. Johnson returned to staring off into space.

  “And he never showed up?” Britney asked.

  He vaguely shook his head.

  “And isn’t his case over? I mean, he was sentenced and he went to jail and it’s over, right? What new stuff is there to discover?”

  Her father’s hands described invisible shapes in the air.

  “Just … things,” he said. There was something resigned, broken, in the way he said this.

  Britney had no idea what those things were, but she imagined that they weren’t good. She remembered what the detective had said about a guy with the same name working at that raft rental place when her mother had died, and she shuddered.

  twenty

  It was four-thirty Monday morning, and Karl was already at work. The sun wouldn’t rise for three more hours, and he was alone under the ghostly fluorescents of the Bavarian Brat Haus’s packaging center.

  He tuned the radio to his favorite station: 102.7, The Viper—classic rock, pure and simple with more music, less talk, and hourly rock blocks to keep you going all day long. Turning the volume up to the max, he spun the nozzle attached to the wall and wheeled out the hose to spray down the room.

  He set the hose’s spray gun attachment on the nozzle to its most powerful stream. The water spewed out in a strong jet and as it hit, it shoved the dust forward. As the sprayed area grew, a border of black grime developed around its contour. The trick was to spray in an ever-increasing circle, gradually pushing the grime toward the drainage hole in the dead center of the room.

  He sang along to the radio as he worked. La-a-ayla—darling, won’t you ease my worried mi-i-i-ind.

  Once the spraying down was done, Karl had to prepare the processing tools. He unhinged the funnel of the first grinder and pulled out the rotating blades, testing their sharpness on his finger as he ran the diamond steel sharpener over them. He did the same with the grinder plates. He repeated this whole process over again with the second grinder. Then the third. Then the fourth.

  Sometimes, when the music was especially soulful and deep, he crooned. “Wild Horses.” “Open Arms.” “Jukebox Hero.”

  And then it was on to the butchering knives. The boring knives. The breaking knives. The cimeter knives. The skinner knives. The seven-inch carbon steel cleavers.

  When he heard the opening few chords of Zep’s “Black Dog,” he took a break. He pranced around the room, a cleaver in each hand, pretending he was a kung fu master.

  Then he laid the knives out in order on the steel tables, one set for each work area.

  The Bavarian Brat Haus was a full-service meat-finishing facility. They didn’t kill the animals, but they took them from carcass to premium cut and prepared a whole line of specialty sausages: kaiser brats, Numberger brats, kackwurst and knackwurst and knockwurst and bockwurst and knoblewurst, Wisconsin red brats and classic Sheboygan-style brats, summer sausage, andouille, and, of course, wieners.

  For sanitary reasons, they could only make one type of sausage a day, so they packaged on a rotating schedule. Today was the “whites,” as Karl had learned to call them. Munich weisswurst, veal and pork mixed with mild, slightly sweet seasonings.

  He danced into the walk-in freezer to select the cuts that were needed today.

  A gutted cow hung from a hook in the middle of the freezer. Along one wall was a row of halved pigs. Along the opposite wall was a large shelving unit on which were stacked various cuts of veal and beef. The prime meat was too valuable to be used in sausages. What he was looking for were the end parts, the throwaways. These were usually slopped together in large steel vats against the back wall. They weren’t there, though, today. That was odd.

  As he dragged a canister of bloom gelatin (the binding agent the Brat Haus used for its sausages, which is made up of a mixture of head cheese, souse, and blood tongue) from the freezer, the radio fritzed out.

  That was even odder, but he shrugged it off, figuring that there was a short in the cord—it was a cheap old thing, after all.

  Once he’d placed gelatin next to each of the grinders, he fidgeted with the radio, trying to get it to work again. The cord was sticky and soft, and by feeling his way down it, he was able to feel the wires running inside the plastic sheathing. Near the plug, there was a short stretch where the wire had been exposed and was taped together with electrician’s tape. He stripped this and twisted the wires, trying to get them to form a complete circuit.

  “Ow! Shit!”

  He gave himself a doozy of a shock.

  Giving up on the radio, he returned to the freezer to get the boxes of hog casing that they would need for the sausages.

  There was a loud bang, like someone had just smashed a sledgehammer onto the concrete floor, and then the lights went out.

  Karl couldn’t see anything. He knew his way around pretty well, though, so he carried the first box out into the dark packing room and set it on one of the tables.

  The knives he’d laid out were scattered around, no longer in the nice order he’d placed them in. The cleaver was missing. He must have knocked into them in the darkness. But he hadn’t heard the cleaver clatter to the floor.

  “Hello?” he said, looking around to see if anyone was there.

  Silence.

  He returned to the freezer for the next box. As he bent to pick it up, something moved behind him.

  He spun to see what was there, but he was too late. The cleaver was swinging down toward him—slicing his right arm and knocking him back into the shelving. Frozen veal came falling down onto his head.

  Someone stood over him, bundled in a heavy black snowmobile suit, face covered by a hunter orange ski mask.

  Struggling to his feet, Karl lunged for his attacker. He wasn’t quick enough. The attacker backed away, slashing the air with the cleaver.

  Grabbing the first thing he could get his hands on—a frozen veal shank, as it turned out—Karl began swinging wildly. He landed a blow on his attacker’s head, which sent both of them tumbling to the concrete floor, but in his weakened state Karl lost his grip on his weapon in the process.

  As they rolled around, Karl tried to grab the cleaver from his assailant’s hands, but his arm was useless. He was losing a lot of blood. He was getting woozy.

  The cleaver flicked through the air. Karl’s only defense was to duck and twirl in hopes of staying out of its way, but with each movement, his head grew heavier, his vision became more blurred. He was losing strength quickly.

  It finally caught him just above the shoulder blade, severing his carotid artery.

  He howled. He clawed at his wounds with his good, left hand. The blood was thick—it froze as soon as it hit the air—but the warm blood pumping out of the open gash in his neck kept coming.

  The door slammed shut.

  The freezer was pitch black inside.

  Karl was cold.

  So cold.

  Unbearably cold.

  twenty-one

  Usually Britney had nothing to say to Dr. Yeager, the soft-spoken, middle-aged shrink her father forced her to visit. Her weekly appointment was for Monday morning at nine, which meant she had to miss the first two periods of school. The rules were that she could talk if she wanted to, and if she didn’t, she could sit there silently and wait for the hour to tick away.

  Her father attended with her—they were in family grief counseling, supposedly to help them deal with her mother’s death—and most weeks, he filled up the time with his own stream of consciousness. Memories of playing I Spy on family road trips; of the time Jan ran the Chicago marathon and the hours he put into helping her train, riding his b
icycle behind her, spurring her on with encouraging words and carrying her water and PowerBars; of the various times (and he seemed to remember each and every one) when he had let his anxiety over his work create conflict between the two of them.

  Sometimes he touched on the psychiatric troubles his wife experienced late in her life, the paranoia and religious fervor, the insomnia and erratic behavior. At these times, his voice fell nearly to a whisper, and the loudest sound in Dr. Yeager’s bright office was Britney’s anxious sighs of discomfort.

  But today, he wasn’t there.

  She drove to therapy herself, in a separate car from her father, and usually he arrived a good fifteen minutes before she did. The only thing that stopped her from skipping out was that if she did so, he would take the car away from her. It was one of the stipulations he’d laid down when he bought it for her. Seeing that he hadn’t bothered to come today, she felt resentful, like she’d somehow been tricked.

  To punish him, she’d opened up to Dr. Yeager today. She spent the time complaining about her father. By nine-thirty, when he still wasn’t there, she’d begun to repeat herself.

  “That’s the thing about him,” she said. “One little thing, even if it’s just a tiny thing, a completely unimportant thing, and it will send him spiraling back into his depression. I mean, so his flaky client stood him up? What does he expect? I mean, Karl? Come on. The guy’s a charity case. And he’s creepy.”

  “You’ve got some strong feelings about Karl,” said Dr. Yeager.

  Britney shrugged.

  Prodding, Dr. Yeager said, “I wonder, do you think maybe you’re jealous of the fact that he’s taking up so much of your father’s time?”

  This was exactly the sort of statement that Britney expected from Dr. Yeager. Hearing him talk this way reminded her why she usually kept her mouth shut in therapy.

  She folded her arms across her chest and fumed. But she continued sitting there. She knew that the doctor wouldn’t bring anything up, not Ricky, not her mother, nothing, unless she gave him a sense that she’d open up to him. She was going to stay silent until the hour was up, whether to punish the doctor or to punish her father, she wasn’t sure.