Killing Britney Page 13

  Stubbing her cigarette out in the waterlogged steel trough by the door, Tara Russell stepped inside Madison Arena to check out the damage. She liked to evaluate her crime scenes in solitude. It helped her think.

  Lately, she’d been thinking a lot and coming up with nothing.

  As she made her way through the fluorescent-lit cinder block tunnel that led to the cavernous rink inside the arena, she mulled over the facts again. Ricky Piekowski. Karl Brown. Their deaths seemed unconnected, yet at the same time, how could they be? No matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t figure out what the connection was. Both of them were close to the Johnson family but in completely different contexts, in completely different ways.

  That kid Bobby Plumley was interesting to her. He owned a red Ford Ranger, which, from the forensic evidence, was the kind of truck that had killed Ricky. And he obviously had an unnatural fixation on Britney. After what she’d heard from Britney, she’d spoken to him and since then, she’d been keeping a loose eye on him. She had enough evidence to get a judge to slap a restraining order on him, keeping him away from Britney, but she didn’t want to do that just yet. At this point, she figured he was just your garden-variety creep.

  Anyway, he had an alibi for the night Ricky Piekowski had died: he’d been with Melissa Brown, playing Vice City in her living room. Melissa had corroborated this, and her parents had also said Bobby had been there, at least until they’d gone to bed at ten-thirty.

  Another person she was suspicious of was Adam Saft. She found it interesting that all this mischief had begun so soon after his arrival in town, that he’d been so conveniently nearby when Britney had found that CD in her car. The gun that Melissa had found in Karl’s apartment had turned out to be registered to Ed Johnson, and Tara found how much Adam knew about Mr. Johnson’s guns unnerving. It was conceivable, though as yet improvable, that Adam and Karl had been up to something.

  Of course, this same evidence could just as easily point toward Ed Johnson himself. And the connection between Mr. Johnson and Karl Brown was extensive and well documented. The shotgun shell that Britney had given her had matched the ones used to shoot up the scoreboard above her head—and both of them were a match for the gun belonging to Mr. Johnson that Melissa had discovered in Karl’s apartment. Tara had begun to wonder if there were some dark agreement between Ed Johnson and Karl, trailing all the way back to the death of Mr. Johnson’s wife—the fact that Karl had worked at that raft rental company was a little too coincidental for her comfort. But why? She saw no motive for Mr. Johnson.

  The whole thing gave her a headache.

  Inside the arena, Tara was confronted with a grisly trail of destruction.

  A wide, solid path of blood trailed down the center of the ice like a red carpet laid out for an awards ceremony. It was not only frozen, it was embedded, saturating the ice the way the regulation paint did.

  A trail of shredded clothing was strewn along the edges of the path—a ski jacket, its white synthetic stuffing strewn everywhere, bits of brown corduroy, the strips of pink nylon that looked like they had once been the straps of a bra, chunks of cotton and wool. All of it was soaked through with blood. Some of it had clumps of curly red hair clinging to it.

  At the end of this path sat the Zamboni, a small tractor dragging a squeegee behind it. Attached to the front of the tractor was a large water tank. The water inside was red—somehow the victim’s blood had been pumped into it.

  She had to kneel down to see it, but there was a body after all. Or most of a body. A mess of dismembered parts, internal organs spilling every which way, more clothing in larger pieces—a thick dark shellac of blood poured over all of it. The body was jammed into the metal shield at the rear of the Zamboni, caught like chicken bones in the corkscrew blade that was contained there.

  Though it was disfigured and mutilated, the head was still in one piece. She’d have to get someone in to identify it, but Tara already recognized the features.

  Melissa Brown.

  After touring the rest of the facility, Tara could pretty much tell what had happened.

  Somehow the killer had gotten the Zamboni out of its locked shed and driven it out onto the ice. He’d also somehow lured Melissa here. Once he had her on the ice, he had locked off all the exits. Then it was a simple matter of chasing her around the arena until she got tired, tripping her up, and running her over. Once she’d been yanked into the ice-shaving blade at the rear of the machine, there hadn’t been any hope left for her. The more she struggled, the farther she must have been pulled in. She’d been ripped to shreds. But that hadn’t been enough. The killer had kept going, grinding her into a bloody pulp that had contaminated the water tank and then been spewed out the rear of the Zamboni in a sheet of liquid that was then smoothed down into a new layer of ice by the squeegee.

  Another innocent lost, Detective Tara Russell thought. And I’m no nearer to solving this case than I was before the poor girl died.

  twenty-eight

  For many long hours, Britney watched the light from the window creep across her bedroom wall.

  Time passed so slowly. She felt like she was floating underwater, like her bed was keeling in strong ocean currents, being carried deeper and deeper into a dark, rocky cavern where she was all alone. She felt like she’d be stuck there, unable to move, waiting, waiting for her torturer to find her. There was no escape. All she could do now was try not to suffocate in dread.

  A soft rapping on her bedroom door woke Britney from this reverie.

  “Come—” She cleared her throat. “Come in.”

  She could tell it was Adam by the shape of his silhouette in the dim hall light.

  For some reason she couldn’t quite explain to herself, she was happy to see him.

  “Is it okay if I sit with you for a while?” he asked. His voice was hoarse, barely a whisper.

  “Sure.”

  He sat on the lip of her bed, his hands in his lap, and stared off into the darkness. In the moonlight, Britney could see the side of his face. His eyes were puffy. He’d been crying, though he wasn’t crying now.

  She watched him for a while. He didn’t move and he didn’t speak. She wished he’d do something obnoxious, pull one of his mock-cute moves—it would make things feel a little more normal. He just sat there, though, in a daze.

  “I can’t believe she’s gone,” she said finally, the thought carrying in from a long ways away.

  “Yeah, me neither.”

  “I feel like it’s my fault.”

  The look in his eyes as he latched onto hers was more earnest than she’d ever seen from him. “It’s not your fault.”

  “It is,” she said. “All of this is my fault. It’s like just by existing, I make horrible things happen to everybody around me.”

  He shook his head.

  “It’s always been that way. If my mother was here, you could ask her. She knew.”

  Britney hesitated, wondering how much she should tell Adam about her mother.

  “She used to tell me all the time. She called me Chaos. She’d tap me on the chest and say, ‘You can’t hide the trouble in there from me.’”

  “That doesn’t sound so bad.”

  How could she explain the torture she went through with her mother, the mixture of hatred and fear that sometimes stole across her mother’s face when she looked at her?

  “It was bad. It was horrible. She told me that there was something wrong with me—that I was sick. Not physically sick. Sick in another way. All rotted inside. When I was a little girl, she’d start crying sometimes and I’d get scared and ask why and she’d say she was thinking about all the ways I was going to hurt her one day.”

  Adam took her hand. “Britney,” he said, “you’re not sick. Okay? She’s the one who was sick.”

  “Look what’s happening! Everyone I know is dying! If it wasn’t for me, they’d all still be alive!” The tears were running down her face now. “You know? Everything would be fine if I just wasn’t here!
”

  Taking her other hand, Adam squeezed hard on both of them, like he thought by tightening his grasp, he could forcibly pull her back from the brink.

  “You didn’t kill anybody, Britney,” he said firmly. “It’s scary as hell, I know, but you can’t blame yourself. That’s just what whoever is doing this wants!”

  “But it’s true,” she said, her face contorting with the effort to control her tears. “It’s like with my mother. The whole point of going was to try and do something fun as a family, to distract us from all my mom’s problems. And right up to the time we left, she kept trying to cancel it. You know why? Because she knew. She told me. We had a big fight right before we left and she said, ‘This is it, Britney. One of us …’” She couldn’t go any further; the tears overwhelmed her.

  Adam had her by the shoulders. He squeezed her tight until her shaking subsided.

  “‘One of us isn’t going to come back.’ That’s what she said.” Britney sobbed for a few minutes more. “And the whole car ride up, I knew she was right, but I was afraid to say anything about it.”

  “She was wrong. Britney, she was wrong. You have to remember that. And maybe whoever is doing this knows that too, but you can’t let them beat you. Okay? You can’t let them destroy you.”

  He was saying all the right things. She held on to him as though he were the only thing holding her up.

  When he awkwardly tried to untangle himself from her, she didn’t want to let him go. She laced her fingers through his. She felt bad about her life. She felt bad for Melissa. She felt bad for Adam.

  But she was so glad he was here next to her. Holding her hand. Sitting close to her. It seemed like the most natural thing in the world.

  His thumb meandered slowly along the back of her hand. It felt nice. She squeezed briefly, a little pulse of encouragement.

  She couldn’t tell if she was sad anymore.

  His face was so open, so unguarded when he finally looked at her. The two of them gazed into each other’s eyes, neither sure of what to do next. She wanted to kiss him. It was a terrible thing to want to do, an unforgivable betrayal of Ricky and, even more, of Melissa, but she wanted it anyway.

  “We shouldn’t be doing this,” she said.

  “I know.”

  He crinkled his eyes like he was looking through her, deep into her secret self.

  She couldn’t hold back any longer. She pulled him toward her and hugged him. She kissed him.

  Then, falling back on the bed, she kissed him again.

  He held her tight. He buried his head in her chest.

  “I can’t believe it,” she heard him say. “I’ve wanted this since I can remember. My whole life.” The words tingled down her spine. She’d never felt such a strong desire.

  He was the one doing the kissing now. Her eyelid, her ear, her nose, her neck. His tears covered her face.

  “I’m such a horrible person,” she said.

  “You’re not. Not at all,” he said. “You’re beautiful.”

  She pulled at the engagement ring on her finger, pried it off, and set it on the bedside table.

  twenty-nine

  In the dark of the Computer Rebooter, under a single clip lamp, Bobby shook and howled. The tears ran in torrents down his face. He wasn’t playing games or tinkering with hard drives, not today.

  He couldn’t get that last conversation with Melissa out of his head. There was something about Adam Saft that disturbed him. Why did Adam know so much about that gun? Why had he been so opposed to telling Mr. Johnson that one of his guns had been stolen? He remembered the comment Adam had made after catching Bobby watching over Britney: “You’re lucky I didn’t go grab one of Mr. Johnson’s guns and shoot you with it.”

  A quick Google search of Adam’s name garnered forty-two hits.

  Nineteen of them were for articles covering Adam’s high school golf team in the Manchester Herald—games won and lost, points scored, etc. These weren’t of any interest to Bobby.

  Six were articles Adam himself had written for the JFK High School paper, The Discovery, about things like the controversy over the installation of Coke machines in the hallways, the congestion problems in the school parking lot, and the debate team’s success in the state competition. They weren’t terribly well written, Bobby noted, and Adam seemed to have been given all the worst assignments.

  Most of the other hits came from a blog called Kissing the Wind. It belonged to some guy named Toby Richards, a friend of Adam’s from New Hampshire.

  Bobby read these in order, and at first, they consisted of the usual gossip and complaints about school. Typical stuff about which girls were cute and whether they would smile at you in the halls. Rankings of teachers based on the amount of homework they gave multiplied by how cool they were. Anecdotes about parties and stupid things Toby and Adam got up to over the weekend. As they went on, though, the entries began to change; in August of the year before, a rift began to develop between Toby and Adam:

  Adam hasn’t talked to me in a week. He got pissed at me because I told him it wasn’t a big deal, everybody’s parents get divorced nowadays. My parents are divorced. I said, he’ll get used to it, but he doesn’t believe me. It’s almost like he’s looking for an excuse to feel sorry for himself.

  Throughout the semester, the problems between them grew:

  The other day, Adam said to me, “People are mean. Everybody’s just so cruel to each other. It almost makes you think it’s not worth trying to be nice.” I couldn’t believe it. Or, actually, I could. He used to be one of the nicest guys in school, but now that he’s started hanging out with Fisher Pomerantz and Hal Struthers, he’s become almost as big of an asshole as they are. All they do is try and pick up girls—not even girls they like. It’s like they’re just trying to prove they can do it. When he’s with them, Adam gets this look on his face like he thinks he’s the coolest thing on earth.

  And then Adam started to get in real trouble:

  Here’s the deal—or at least Adam’s version of it: Fisher and Hal sell stolen fuzz busters and car radios. He doesn’t completely know how it all works, but he says that they told him they’d give him a cut if he joined them. I don’t know what he thinks. It’s not like those guys are going to stick up for him. Their parents are powerful people, and his aren’t. If he gets arrested, he’s screwed.

  So on Saturday, Adam was arrested for breaking into a car. He was trying to steal a fuzz buster. I could have told him this would happen.

  Adam says Fisher and Hal set him up. He says that the whole stolen goods business was an elaborate joke, that they tricked him into doing it and then they made sure he got caught. He wanted me to help him get back at them, but I flat-out refused. I’m not even sure I believe him about them setting him up. He’s really disturbed. He’s been doing drugs—I know, because I smelled pot smoke on his clothes after lunch hour on Monday—and his favorite phrase now is “So-and-so (insert any random person’s name here) deserves to die.” He says this with a big grin on his face, so I can’t tell how much he’s joking, but still, it’s spooky.

  This went on for almost a month. Each entry would detail more and more of the odd things Adam was doing: skipping school, picking fights with kids who were smaller than him, whispering about setting Fisher’s house on fire. It all culminated in Adam being kicked out of school:

  He had a deer-hunting rifle in his locker, and they think he was planning to use it. If he was, it’s news to me, but I still hope nobody wants me to talk to them about it. I wouldn’t know what to say. He claims he had it because he was going to go hunting, but I’ve never known him to be much of a hunter, and the way he’s been acting lately, I wouldn’t put it past him to use it on people. I want to believe that underneath the bitterness and anger at all the crappy things that have happened to him in the past few months, he’s still the same great guy he always was. But I just don’t know.

  There were links to newspaper stories from all over the state describing the incident a
t the school. It turned out that Adam’s notebooks were full of doodles of skulls and pentagrams and stuff like that.

  This wasn’t the Adam that Bobby knew. He wondered which was the real one.

  A later blog entry mentioned that Adam was being sent to Wisconsin to “give him the space to get his head screwed on straight.”

  He’s going to be staying with some friend of his father’s and he’s really pissed off about the whole thing. The problem is the guy’s daughter. Adam really hates her. Then again, since his parents separated, it seems like Adam hates all girls.

  Bobby couldn’t read any more of this. He was too angry.

  He e-mailed the link to Detective Russell.

  Then he clicked out of Explorer and tried to calm himself down by killing monsters until three in the morning.

  thirty

  She didn’t hear him knock.

  She didn’t even hear him talking to her, not the first time. Or the second or third time.

  It wasn’t until her father was screaming at her—screaming like she’d never heard him scream, shouting, “What the hell’s going on in here! Britney! Get up now! You don’t have any idea how much trouble you’re in!”—that she really woke up.

  But oh, did she ever wake up then.

  She bolted upright in the bed. Her eyes wild, her hair a frenzied mess of tangles, she barked, “What kind of trouble? Who’s here? What’s happening?” Then she realized where she was and what her father was looking at. She was naked and beside her, his body twisted around hers, Adam was naked too. She reached for something to cover herself with, but she couldn’t find anything—the covers must have fallen to the floor in the night. There was nowhere to hide.

  As she flung herself from the bed and scrambled for the sheet bunched up on the ground, she immediately jumped into have-mercy mode. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.”