Killing Britney Page 6

  Britney’s father had demanded that Adam be seated with the family. Up to now, he’d been surprisingly well—behaved—Britney figured this was due to the warning her father had given him in the car on their way over—but as soon as Melissa came over, he perked up. In a really obvious way, he started glancing at the two girls. Every five seconds, his eyes would dart back to them and linger in what Britney thought was a leering stare. The only thing that stopped Britney from telling him off was that to do so would mean she had to speak to him. She didn’t want to give him any excuse to make a scene.

  “Better?” asked Melissa.

  “Yeah,” said Britney. Squeezing Melissa’s hand, she pulled her friend close so she could whisper in her ear. “Listen, I want to say this now because it seems like the right moment and moments like this don’t come around too often. You’re the only one. The only one in the whole wide world who knows what I’m really like. Whatever happens, I want you to know that.”

  “Shush,” said Melissa. “You don’t have to say that. I’m just doing what anyone would do. You know, there’s this place in Africa where the society works in this way so that the women are the leaders, and they share all of one another’s burdens. When any one member of the community is in pain, the rest of the women rally around her and pick up her slack until she’s recovered. I’ve seen you through worse. I’m not going anywhere.”

  “See, that’s what I mean.” Britney squeezed Melissa’s hand one more time and then let it go before she could start to cry.

  As soon as Melissa had left, Adam leaned over and said, “Listen, I’m sorry I gave you such a hard time the other night at dinner. I’ve been thinking about it, and I feel … bad. Can we call a truce?”

  Britney wasn’t sure what to make of this. Knowing Adam, she suspected it might be a trap. She screwed up her face. “I’ll think about it,” she said.

  “Hey, I’ll take what I can get,” he said.

  She could feel someone standing on the other side of her, and with relief, she turned her back to Adam.

  The person waiting to talk to her turned out to be a police officer, a leggy, glamorous-looking woman in her mid-twenties. The familiar blue-black uniform looked better on her than Britney remembered it looking on other female cops. It didn’t bulk up in the butt like they usually did. The severity of the uniform accentuated her long blond curls. When she squatted on one knee to chat, Britney noticed that her nose was covered in faint freckles, and she was chewing bubble gum.

  “I’m Tara Russell,” said the woman, “the detective who’s looking into Ricky’s case. I wanted to take a sec to introduce myself. Listen, can I pull you away for a minute?”

  “Um, sure,” Britney said.

  “Mind if we step outside? I’m dying for a cigarette.”

  As they walked toward the large double doors at the other end of the room, Detective Russell blew bubbles. Her gum was sour apple green.

  Britney was surprised that the detective was so cavalier about smoking on the job. “Are you allowed to do that?” she asked.

  The detective frowned. “Why wouldn’t I be? We’re going outside, aren’t we?”

  With the windchill, the temperature outside was hitting thirty below, so the two of them stood in the small foyer between the parking lot and the hall. The only thing between them and the elements were some plate glass windows, but these were enough to keep them from shivering.

  “You want one?” asked the detective as she pulled a pack of Camel Lights from her purse.

  “I’m okay,” said Britney.

  “If you want one, it’s not a problem. It’s not like I’m going to tell on you or anything.”

  “I don’t smoke,” said Britney. She was nervous, afraid that whatever the detective had to say was going to be more bad news. Why else would they have had to leave the room to talk?

  “Well, first, let me see the ring!” Detective Russell’s voice, as she said this, swung gleefully.

  Tilting her hand back and forth to catch the light and make it twinkle in the diamond, Britney said, “It’s only half a carat, but it’s got a white gold band. Regular gold is so tacky.”

  “It’s beautiful! Is it inscribed?”

  “No.” Britney’s face fell. She wondered if the fact that the ring wasn’t inscribed cheapened it in some way.

  “It’s a real tragedy the way this happened, isn’t it?”

  Looking the detective in the eye, Britney saw compassion, but she also saw something else: her eyes had a sharp clarity to them.

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Back when I was in college, I dated a UW football star. He never gave me a ring like that. You should cherish it.”

  Britney nodded.

  Abruptly changing the subject, the detective said, “I know this is an awkward time, but I need to go over some things with you. Right now we’re treating this as an accident, so I’m just covering my bases, but—”

  Something burst inside Britney. It felt like her veins had turned into waterfalls, the blood rushing, tumbling down toward her stomach. “Have you talked to Digger?” She spoke quickly, the words leaping over each other in a race to the finish.

  “Who’s Digger?”

  “Ricky’s hockey buddy. Doug Dietz.”

  “Well, no. Should I have?”

  “I don’t know,” Britney said. “Probably not. He’s been telling people that someone threatened Ricky a few days before he got—passed away. But Digger’s the kind of guy who makes things up, you know?”

  “Hmm.” The detective nodded gravely. “That’s interesting.” She pulled a thick notepad from her belt and wrote something in it. “I’ll tell you what we have done. We’ve performed some forensics on the tire tracks into and out of the gas station, and we’ve ruled out the possibility that whoever was driving that truck lost control on the ice. There was too much salt on the road. And there wasn’t any fishtailing. If he’d lost control, we would have seen signs that he’d tried to brake. But we still haven’t ruled out a drunk driver. I mean, he would have had to have been blitzed out of his mind, but in a college town like this, that’s not at all inconceivable.”

  “Do you have any idea who was driving the truck?”

  Detective Russell shrugged. She looked around for an ashtray, and not finding one, she stubbed her cigarette out on the sole of her shiny black shoe. “We’re running some tests on the paint that scraped off onto Ricky’s car,” she said, “but I wouldn’t hold my breath if I were you. There’s not a lot to go on. I mean, a red pickup? Come on, who doesn’t own one of them?”

  “Well … What about the Prairie Dogs? They could have done it, right? They were really pissed about what happened at the game. I mean, Digger—”

  “I’ve looked into them already. Most of the team was on the bus headed back to Sun Prairie. The only one who wasn’t, Todd Smaltz, and his girlfriend were at the hospital all night.”

  Britney stiffened. “Then you don’t know anything, do you?” She felt like jumping up and down, like pounding her fists against the detective’s chest and screaming, “What are you good for if you can’t even solve a simple hit and run?” But she didn’t. She bounced from foot to foot to help control her adrenaline.

  Detective Russell was popping more gum into her mouth. “I’m working on it,” she said. “You want to go back inside?” As she said this, the detective adjusted her hair in her reflection in the glass. She touched up her makeup. She seemed totally unaffected by the state she’d put Britney in.

  Back inside, just before parting company with Britney, the detective took her by the shoulders and looked her straight in the eyes. “Listen, I want you to know I’m here for you whenever you need me. Here’s my private number.” She handed Britney a business card. “It doesn’t even have to be related to the case. Anything you need, just give me a call. You remind me of what I was like when I was your age.”

  Britney tried to smile. “Thanks,” she said.

  “Promise me you’ll use it?” the detective said.r />
  “Yeah, okay, I guess,” said Britney. “But I hope I don’t have to.”

  eleven

  The Computer Rebooter, where Bobby Plumley worked, was more like a shed than an office. The whole place spooked Adam out. It felt like it could easily be the lair of an evil scientist. It was out on the Washington Avenue strip, in a low cluster of windowless buildings not far from the gas station where Ricky had been killed. It had no sign, and instead of a front door, it had a retractable garage door that could only be opened by remote control. Inside, there were computers of all makes and models piled shoulder high in a ring around the messy work area, a long wooden table on which Bobby could play around with seven computers at once. In the darkness along one wall was a row of routers and servers; their red and green lights flickered like the control panels of a spaceship. The only real light came from a fluorescent rod that had somehow been jimmied so it hung loose over the table.

  Bobby worked for a guy named Ted Dempsey, but Dempsey was never around, and Bobby ran the show, tearing apart and rebuilding motherboards and towers sometimes until four-thirty in the morning. That is, when he wasn’t fiddling with his web site or trying to hack into the Department of Motor Vehicles records. Right now, he and Adam were eating Doritos and playing EverQuest. His T-shirt today showed a drawing of a severed human arm on a plate; underneath, it read Tastes Like Chicken.

  Bobby had embedded all sorts of cheats so that his EverQuest character would be unkillable. He explained to Adam that “this means I can go around hacking people up and stealing their money and basically doing whatever I want, and there’s nothing they can do about it. They can’t even kick me off the game because I’ve build an override to counteract the host commands.”

  Adam was pretty handy on a computer himself. He knew all the cheats Bobby was using—they weren’t that hard to figure out—but playing an unkillable character was sort of boring. What Adam liked about EverQuest was the web of relationships that you developed throughout the world of the game. You had to think about the consequences of any action you took, and you had to work with the rest of the gaming community to really succeed. If you could just go and slaughter people, what was the point?

  It was 10 p.m. and a school night for Adam—not for Bobby because he’d skipped a year and graduated early. Except for last night’s dinner in Ricky’s honor, it was also his first night off since he’d been hired by Amoeba Records, and there was no way he was going to waste it on doing schoolwork.

  “So, you were right,” he said, shoving a Dorito into his mouth. “Britney got all weird when I mentioned your name. What did you do to her?”

  Bobby’s gaze remained on the game. He continued typing commands into the computer throughout their conversation. “What did I do to her? The question is, what did she do to me!”

  “Well, tell me.”

  “It’s complicated.”

  “Everything’s complicated. Life is complicated.”

  “She’s just …” Bobby paused and frowned at the screen. “She’s a messed-up girl.” He started tapping the keyboard with a rapid vigor. “Look at that!” He grinned maniacally at Adam. “I just burned that mofo’s house down! Let’s go see what he’s got to steal!”

  They played the game for a while—or Bobby played, and Adam watched. Figuring that he wasn’t going to get anywhere with his questions, Adam said, “I heard this great CD two days ago at my new job—”

  “Oh, man,” Bobby cut him off, “I can get you whatever you want for free. I know how to get around all the firewalls. What do you want? Grab a blank CD from the shelf over there. We can burn it right now.”

  Before they could get the process started, the metal grate that served as a door began rattling. The sound echoed ferociously around the room, bouncing off the concrete floor.

  “That must be Melissa,” said Bobby. “Can you get it? You just have to push the button against that wall over there.”

  To reach the automatic door opener, Adam had to watch his feet, picking his way across the room. Spare cords, loose mice, keyboards, and small green plates covered with wires and knobs were strewn everywhere. He actually had to climb over a wall of monitors.

  Once the door was open, he discovered it was the same Melissa who was Britney’s friend, the redheaded girl who had rubbed her shoulders at the dinner, shivering outside. Well, that’s odd, he thought. But he didn’t mind her showing up here at all—last night, when she’d been wearing that blue crushed velvet gown, he’d thought she was beautiful, and now, here, even in her ski jacket and woolen cap, nothing had changed.

  “Hi, Adam,” she said, as if she’d expected to see him, as if they’d known each other all their lives as opposed to having seen each other, what, maybe five times total, and always in passing. They’d never even spoken to each other.

  Adam, trying to imagine what her face would look like without her glasses on, had to force himself to stop staring.

  “Hi, uh, Melissa.”

  As Adam pushed the button to shut out the cold and began climbing back over the monitors, Bobby yelled over to the two of them. “Adam was just asking me about Britney. He wants to know what I did to her.”

  Melissa laughed. “Bobby didn’t do anything to Britney. Britney broke his heart.”

  She made it back to the work area before Adam, and sitting down in the metal folding chair he had been using, she said to Bobby, “But that doesn’t excuse you from not making it yesterday. What was up? You told me you’d be there.”

  “I was at the funeral; you just didn’t see me.”

  “Well, you weren’t at the reception.”

  “I wasn’t invited.”

  “When have you ever waited for an invitation?”

  Bobby shot her a pained look. He glancing at Adam, who had finally found his way back, and said, “There are more folding chairs over there by the servers.”

  Adam gazed out into the dark back corner of the room. He could see the folding chairs, but he couldn’t see any way to reach them.

  Melissa scooted to one side of her chair. When she smiled at him, he noticed she had a dimple on her right cheek. She patted the seat next to her and said, “Don’t even try it. You’ll kill yourself trying to climb over all that junk. Here. I stole your chair to begin with. Let’s share.”

  God, was she beautiful. Her beauty was embedded in that dimple; it was soaked into the husky edge of her voice; it was deeper than fashion, deeper than skin. Adam found that he was suddenly hoarse. His voice cracked and he blushed as he said, “I don’t think Britney’d be happy to hear about us sharing a chair.”

  “There are lots of things I do that Britney wouldn’t be happy to hear about,” she said, winking at him. “So Bobby, do tell. Why weren’t you there?”

  Bobby glanced skeptically at Adam again, and then he shrugged. If he was trying to be subtle, he was doing a terrible job.

  “Oh, don’t worry about Adam. He’s one of us,” said Melissa.

  Though he wasn’t sure what she meant by this, it felt nice to hear Melissa say it. Since he’d arrived in Madison, he hadn’t felt like he belonged, really, anywhere.

  Reluctantly, Bobby began to explain. “That funeral sort of freaked me out. I mean … Didn’t it freak you out?”

  “You mean that weird clapping after Britney’s speech?”

  “No, that was just some lughead asshole. I mean the way Britney was acting. She didn’t seem jittery to you?”

  “She always seems jittery.”

  “I don’t know, Melissa.” Bobby glanced at Adam again. “I thought I saw that look in her eyes.”

  “What look?”

  “That look.”

  “Well, obviously, she had that look again,” Melissa said. “She’s falling apart. That’s why I wish you had been at the reception.”

  Adam broke in. “What are you guys talking about?”

  Melissa turned to Adam. “Sometimes Britney can go to some pretty dark places. I mean dark places. Pitch-black places.”

 
Bobby jumped in to elaborate. “And the harder she tries to act like her life is perfect, the more you can bet that she’s breaking apart.”

  They went on like this for almost an hour, explaining all kinds of things Adam had never noticed: That when she was especially tense, Britney had a way of rapidly, repeatedly cracking her jaw. That she used to hate the hockey thugs and their silly wives as much as Bobby and Melissa did, but after her mother died, she had become obsessed with them and made it her mission to become best friends with them. That her mother’s body had never been discovered. The assumption was that it had been pulled into the rapids and smashed on the rocks below Waukesha Falls.

  “Jeez,” said Adam. “My folks told me she’d been having a hard time, but I had no idea any of this was going on.” He felt horrible. If he’d known all this, he would have tried harder to be nice to Britney. He’d been operating under the assumption that she was just a typical popular girl who judged everybody and was always looking for a way to hold on to her feeling of superiority. It felt to Adam now that he was the one who had been refusing to give her a chance. He promised himself that he’d show more compassion from here on out.

  It was almost eleven-thirty and Mr. Johnson had told Adam to be home by twelve.

  “So,” he said, “who’s going to cart me home? Melissa?”

  Without looking up, Bobby said, “Yeah, Melissa, take him home. I’ve got some serious killing to do here.”

  “I don’t know,” she said, winking at him as she grabbed her coat. “I don’t think I trust him alone with me.”

  “Good call,” Adam said. “I wouldn’t trust me alone with you either.”

  Once they were outside and headed toward the Johnsons’ house, he said, “What I don’t understand is, it seems like you two care about Britney a lot. Why does she hate Bobby so much?”

  “Bobby? Well, he has his problems too,” said Melissa. Abruptly changing the subject, she pushed the play button on her car stereo and said, “Here, listen to this new CD I picked up last week. It’s incredible.” It was Belle and Sebastian. Dear Catastrophe Waitress. “It came out a couple of years ago, but it’s great, isn’t it?”