Killing Britney (9 page)

seventeen

There
she was.

He’d parked down the hill around a bend in the road, and it took him a few minutes to make his way back, but now he’d found her.

As Britney wandered up the path that led to the lake, trudging through the snow, he’d kept to the woods. She couldn’t see him, but he could see her. His view was blocked a bit by the trees from this vantage, but he didn’t want to get much closer.

Knowing where she was and what she was doing was enough. All he needed for his purposes. Surprise was his best friend. Stay hidden. Stay stealthy. As long as he kept his ski mask on, no one would be able to recognize him.

She sat down on a park bench and gazed out toward the lake. What was she looking for? All that was out there at this time of year were ice-fishing shacks.

And she wasn’t dressed for the weather. No hat. No scarf. No gloves. Her only protection from the elements was the letter jacket she always wore nowadays. He was bundled up in a snowmobile suit, and he still felt the chill. How could she stand it?

Watch a while longer, he told himself. See what she does.

He heard an engine purring behind him, the crunch of ice and snow under tires. If he peered, he could just make out the parking lot. The rear bumper of Britney’s yellow Bug. Darkness. Then a splotch of red rolled into view.

Scampering back toward the parking lot, he hid behind a pine tree and peered into the clearing. What he saw was a red pickup truck. A Ford Ranger—similar to the one he himself owned, except his was cooler, decked out with designer hubs and a killer sound system. The truck must be at least ten years old; rust had spread across the wheel wells and formed little sores all over the hood. The person who hopped out of it was tall. His features were shrouded behind the deep fur-lined hood of his parka. He walked like he knew where he was going.

He ran back to his post in the woods and saw that Britney was right where he’d left her. He crouched. He waited.

A few moments later, he spotted the tall guy again. He got a better look this time—blue jeans, a black, thigh-length parka. Who was this guy, and what was he doing here?

More important, how strong was this guy? It was hard to tell from the parka he was wearing. Strong enough to put up a fight?

The paths through Menominee Park wound around and cut across one another; only one led directly toward the clearing by the lake. The guy was walking down one of the smaller ones. He’d found a long broken tree limb and was using it as a walking stick. The guy turned at the fork and walked right past him, so close that he curled up and pressed himself into a bush, shutting his eyes tight, as though this would help shield him. He stayed this way for a minute or two.

Then the guy started moving toward Britney She had her back to him, and he was walking quietly. When he was just a few feet behind her, he stopped. He gazed out at the lake. She still didn’t see him.

Tense, on his feet now, he was ready to pounce.

Suddenly the two of them—Britney and the guy—were talking. He couldn’t hear what they were saying, but from their body language, they seemed to be exchanging friendly words. Or maybe not. Britney half turned on the bench while she spoke. She seemed guarded, her head and shoulders angled away from the guy—could she tell there was someone else watching them? And the guy kept fiddling with his stick, as though contemplating the correct moment to turn it into a weapon.

They were arguing. Then the guy broke into a rueful laugh.

Get the guy first, then deal with Britney. If he acted fast, the guy would never know what hit him.

He jumped from his hiding place and ran through the snow, stumbling over hidden roots and shrubs. He leapt, threw a diving fist at the guy, but he missed and landed sprawling in the snow.

Then the guy was on top of him—swinging hard. Blows hit his stomach, his arms, his face. The guy yanked off his mask. He was exposed.

He could hear the guy swearing at him, calling him crazy. Britney was shouting at both of them, hysterical. “Stop!” she said. “Stop it. Karl, get out of here!”

By the time he was back on his feet, the guy had run off.

Britney was still there, though, standing a few feet away, her arms crossed. She was staring at him.

“Bobby!” she said, the rage in her voice barely under control.

“Where’d he go?” Bobby asked, looking around in a frenzy.

“How am I supposed to know?” Her eyes were burning. She was full of spite.

Bobby brushed the snow off his snowmobile suit. In the distance, he could hear the truck starting up and peeling away.

“Well, are you all right?”

He reached out to touch her on the elbow, but she pulled violently back.

“Don’t touch me! I swear to God, Bobby, I’m going to have you arrested!” she said.

Holding his hands up in surrender, he said, “That guy was going to attack you. I could feel it.”

Britney said nothing in response. What looked like a mixture of rage and fear and disgust swirled around on her face. Her gaze lingered on Bobby for a second longer, then she shuddered—or was she just shivering from the cold? She picked something—he couldn’t tell what it was—out of the snow at her feet and turned her back on him.

He shouted after her. “Wait! Aren’t you even going to say thank you?”

Alone again, he tried to remember if he knew anybody named Karl. There was only one person he could think of. Melissa’s dirtbag brother. He’d always known that guy was trouble.

eighteen

Britney
sipped her peppermint tea. Her toes bounced rapidly inside her thermal-lined snow boots. She was clicking her jaw back and forth, back and forth. She had fished an
Entertainment Weekly
out of the magazine rack that Fresh Grounds provided for its customers, but she gave up on it quickly. She couldn’t concentrate.

She was still shaken up. As though to gauge the changing state of her emotions, she held her hand up in front of her and tried to control the shaking. She couldn’t.

It was almost nine-thirty, and Detective Russell still hadn’t arrived.

Nine thirty-five. Fresh Grounds was going to close at ten.

Britney was about ready to give up and head home, but just then the detective walked in. She was wearing her uniform, the standard blue-black, complete with gun and club and sagging, over-burdened belt.

“Sorry I’m late,” she said.

She blew a big green bubble. Britney noticed that her lips were coated in a shiny layer of clear gloss. Then, spiting her gum into a piece of wrapper she’d kept for this purpose, she said, “So, what’s up? What happened, Britney? You sounded hysterical when you called me just now.”

“I think I know who it was.”

“Oh?” said the detective. “Well, tell me. Please.”

“Yeah,” Britney said. She fingered the pin on Ricky’s letter jacket as she spoke. “I was having sort of a bad night, you know? Just thinking about Ricky a whole lot and feeling really down about everything. Adam was being really annoying, and it seemed like the only way to get any peace was to go off somewhere and think for a while.”

The detective took notes in a thick leather-bound pad as Britney spoke. “Who’s Adam?” she asked.

Britney explained everything. She told the detective who Adam was and how he had caught Bobby spying on her and how she’d gone off to the park to sit and be alone. “You know, that one off Shoreline Drive with all the hiking paths? What’s it called? Menominee Park, I think.” She told her about how Karl Brown, her friend Melissa’s brother, had happened to be there too, looking for the Indian mounds. “I didn’t even know there were Indian mounds in that park,” she told the detective. She explained how she and Karl had got to talking about random stuff. A friendly conversation—it had cheered her up just to talk about this and that as if everything were normal again. Then out of nowhere, Bobby had come charging up and tried to tackle the guy. “Unless,” she concluded, “he was going after me, which is what I think he was doing.”

“Well …” The detective reviewed her notes. “We can’t be sure of anything until we have all the facts. But I’ll talk to Bobby. You’ll be happy to know I’ve already spoken with Digger about his conversation with Ricky—I didn’t find out much, though. He corroborated what you told me, but he didn’t add anything new.” She gazed contemplatively at Britney, then reached out to hold her hand.

“You’re shaking,” she said.

Britney’s voice caught in her throat as she tried to say, “Yeah.” She slid her hand across the table and let the detective hold it still.

“It must be tough, going through all these emotions again. It must churn up all your feelings about your mother.”

Britney couldn’t speak. She nodded.

“You know, I worked on her case.”

“Really?”

“I didn’t do much. I was new to the force at the time. But yeah, I helped out a little bit.”

“How come I didn’t meet you then?”

“Oh, the stuff I was doing was really low level. I always thought it was sad, though, that they never found her body. Sad for you, I mean. It might have provided you with some closure.”

The topic made Britney even more uncomfortable.

“Why didn’t you tell me this before?” she asked.

The detective thought for a second. “I figured I should get to know you better first. Like I said, I was really low level. I hardly did anything. Typed up a few reports.”

Studying her notes again, the detective tapped her pen on the table.

“Karl Brown. I feel like I’ve heard that name before.”

“He’s Melissa’s brother,” Britney reminder her. “And he was arrested, I don’t know, a year and half ago or so in a crystal meth sting.”

“That’s interesting,” the detective said, taking another note. “But I don’t work narcotics, so it wouldn’t be from that. No, you know what I think it is? I think there was a guy named Karl Brown who worked at the place you guys rented the rafts from.”

Britney threw the detective a cockeyed look.

“On that trip … with your mother.”

“Maybe,” Britney said. “It’s probably not that uncommon a name.”

The thought of Karl being up there the day her mother had died sent a flash of terror and adrenaline suddenly rushing through Britney’s bloodstream. What if he had been involved in her mother’s death? What if he was coming after her now to finish the … No—she couldn’t bear to think about that. She reminded herself this didn’t have anything to do with her mother.

“Are you going to arrest Bobby?” she asked.

“I don’t know as I have enough evidence to do that yet.”

“How about this: did you know that he wanted to date me once? I mean, he really laid it on thick. He asked me out probably fifty times and he wouldn’t take no for an answer. I finally had to totally cut off all contact with him.”

“Before that, you two were friends?”

Britney shrugged. The idea of telling this woman her whole life story disturbed her, especially since she’d worked on her mother’s case. It was all just too close.

“That’s not the point. The point is, who else could it be? He’s
stalking
me.
And
he has a red pickup truck—did you know that? He doesn’t drive it all the time because, technically, it belongs to the computer place he works for, but I’ve seen him riding around in it. Oh, and I found this on the ground while I was talking to him just now!” She handed over the shotgun shell casing she’d picked up. “I think it fell out of his pocket while he was wrestling with Karl.”

“So, you think he’s the one behind everything.”

Britney flinched, hearing those words. “Isn’t it obvious?”

“Nothing’s obvious, but I’ll tell you what: I’m going to check it all out for you.”

nineteen

By
the time Britney got home, she was a complete wreck. It all seemed so clear. Bobby was stalking her, and Detective Russell should stop him. That’s what the police were there for.

Adam didn’t look like he’d moved since she left—he was still slouched on the couch, gazing at the TV, which was now showing a rerun of
That 70s Show.

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. What 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.