Killing Britney (12 page)

twenty-six

Madison
Arena was an odd place to meet, but since Melissa wanted to know what her friend had to tell her, she hadn’t thought twice about making the trek over at twelve-thirty the next night.

Now she was there, in the middle of the rink, slipping back and forth across the red line and waiting. It was freezing. She could feel the chill from the ice right through her snow boots.

Her friend hadn’t shown up yet. This seemed odd too.

She figured the news must have something to do with her brother. What other reason would there be for all this secrecy? Whatever it was, it better be good because the hockey arena was spooky all empty and dark like this. It was full of shadows, and when she’d shouted, “Hello? I’m here!” as she’d walked in, her voice had echoed for a long time against the concrete walls.

The scoreboard that had been shot up still hung there in tatters. It looked like a gutted animal. A wide circle of ragged holes marked its face where the shot had lacerated the sheet metal facing. Red and green wiring dangled from it. Attached to one of these wires was a rectangular box full of lightbulbs; it read Visitors across the top.

She wondered if she should whip out her cell and try to track down her friend. The longer she waited here, the more spooked she got. Fumbling in her purse, she finally found the phone. She flipped through the names until she found the one she wanted.

Just as she was about to push send, a door crashed shut. The sound reverberated around the large empty space.

She dropped her phone.

Reaching down to pick it up, she was startled again when the floodlights all came on at once.

She called out, “Hello?”

She was blinded by the bright white glare from the ice and, when she looked up, from the lights overhead.

There was a low humming, like the sound of a car idling, coming from the goal end of the arena.

By the time Melissa’s eyes adjusted, she saw that the Zamboni had been driven onto the ice. There was movement behind it, and she called out again, “Is that you?”

Someone ran around the edge of the Zamboni and jumped into the cab, so fast that Melissa couldn’t catch who it was—all she saw was a flash of black snowmobile suit.

Standing at center ice, she cursed herself for having come here tonight.

The Zamboni slowly began to roll forward.

She stood stock-still, watching, waiting, hoping beyond hope that this was some sort of exhibition, a dramatic entrance meant to impress her.

And then the Zamboni began picking up speed. It was headed straight for her.

She ran.

But it was hard to run. Her boots had no traction, and the ice was slick.

She made it to the edge of the rink, but where was she supposed to go from there? It was surrounded by a twelve-foot-high ring of glass. Think fast, think fast, she told herself as she jumped out of the way of the huge machine plowing toward her. She barely dodged it. It crashed into the wall, leaving a dent but not shattering the glass, not breaking through the thick wood railing.

And then she was off again, sticking close to the wall, trailing her hand along it in search of an opening. Nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing—even the penalty boxes were closed off to her. They’d been locked from the inside. There was no escape.

Thinking that the Zamboni must have left an opening where it came in, she raced toward the place where she’d first seen it. She slipped and fell face-first, slid a good twelve feet, arms stretched out in front of her.

It was gaining ground.

She tried to scramble up onto her feet, but she kept slipping again, kept falling. She was flailing around.

Then the Zamboni was right there behind her.

She pulled herself forward, tried to crawl away, but it was faster than her. It was right on top of her. She rolled to the right to evade its massive wheels.

As it caught her left foot, she screamed out in pain. The crunching of bones and muscle made a grisly sound, but she didn’t have time to check out her wounds. She’d barely escaped, and the Zamboni was turning around now.

On her feet again, she limped toward the goal end of the rink. It seemed so far away. Miles and miles away. She was breathing heavily. Her foot throbbed, and she had a cramp in her side.

She was moving so slowly, then she was on her face again, pushed there by a nudge of the Zamboni against the back of her thighs.

This time she didn’t have the energy to spin out from under it. Her right foot was the first thing to get caught in the rotor blades under the tractor’s back end. They sliced her rubber boot to shreds and tore through her flesh.

So tired, exhausted now, she knew she couldn’t escape. But she didn’t give up. She kept struggling, clawing at the ice and pulling against the twirling blades sucking her in.

“Why?” she screamed “Why are you doing this? I never did anything to hurt you!” Her voice was swallowed up in the revving of the blades.

From the cab of the Zamboni came this response: “You really don’t know why I’m doing this, Melissa? But I thought you knew everything. Use that big brain of yours. I’m sure you’ll figure it out.”

twenty-seven

The
snow had begun to melt in the few days of unseasonably warm weather that blew through during the second week of February. Islands of slush had formed in the layers of ice, dry-bed rivers, like ant trails, wending between them. The snowbanks had begun to shrink, hardening into small craggy mounds, encrusted with black honeycombs of dirt.

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.