The Midnight House (25 page)

By the time she left New Beginnings, she’d decided to become a psychiatrist. She’d also decided to break from her parents. She stopped seeing them, stopped cashing her dad’s checks, paid for the last two years of medical school herself. Before residency, she joined an army program that gave her a monthly stipend in return for a promise to join the reserves. Part of her knew she’d signed up to piss off her dad, who’d been a lifelong member of the ACLU and burned his draft card during Vietnam. Not the best reason to join, but the decision worked out. She liked being part of the reserves. As a shrink in Southern California, she saw more than her share of borderline personalities, narcissists and drama queens who suffered mainly from boredom and spent their sessions wheedling for Xanax. Talking to soldiers and vets offered a valuable reminder that some twentysomethings faced traumas worse than having nasty stepmoms.

 

 

BUT SOMETIME IN 2006,
her second tour in Iraq, she started coming unwound. Just as in med school, her problems increased incrementally. She had trouble sleeping, and when she did she dreamed incessantly about the soldiers she was treating, especially the ones who’d been hurt. She exercised more and more, telling herself she’d sleep better if she tired out her body. She started to count calories in the mess line.

Then she lost Travis. He was a good-looking kid. A good-looking man. Broad-shouldered, not too tall, sandy blond hair. When he smiled, which wasn’t often, his eyes crinkled. He could have been Paul Newman’s younger brother. His looks shouldn’t have mattered, but of course they did. And he was funny. In a laconic, Texas way. One time, she’d asked him his favorite food.

He’d smirked and said, “Barbecue, ma’am. Favorite car, an F-150. Black with a number-eight bumper sticker. Favorite activity, drinking beer. Favorite music, well, I like both kinds. Country and western. I mean, ma’am, when you’re born in Fort Worth, and your parents name you Travis, you don’t have much choice in the matter. You can fight it, but why bother? Can you guess my favorite hat?”

It was the longest speech Travis ever gave her.

She liked him. She looked forward to seeing him.

She’d thought sending him home was the right move. He wasn’t ready to go back to his unit. He’d started to get paranoid, as severely depressed patients sometimes did. He complained that some of the other guys in his bunk were making fun of him. For a few weeks, she tried antidepressants, but they didn’t help. She didn’t want to force-feed him an antipsychotic like Zyprexa that would make him gain thirty pounds and sleep fifteen hours a day. He’d be branded as mentally ill for the rest of his life. She knew she was running out of time to help him. Her tour was almost over, and he was pressing every day to go back to the field. And the army was so short on frontline guys that they wouldn’t have said no. But she knew he wasn’t ready. He needed to get away from Iraq, from the heat and the wind and the constant reminders of his dead squadmates. She told him she was sending him stateside, where he could get the help he needed.

But Travis Byrne, private first class, disagreed with her diagnosis. And proved her wrong in the most irreversible way possible. And since the night Travis said good-bye to her and the world with a two-word note, she’d felt herself cramping, obsessing over him. “I failed,” he’d written. She felt the same. And after a few months back in San Diego, she decided she needed another mission.

 

 

NOW HERE SHE WAS,
in Stare Kiejkuty, watching Kenneth Karp beat on Jawaruddin bin Zari. From what she could see, Karp wasn’t having much luck. Which meant that he and Jack Fisher would be asking to use the punishment box soon enough. After that, maybe, the fifth cell.

She couldn’t stand Karp. With his constant pacing, his tight energy, he reminded her of a monkey. She’d bet he was covered in thick, black hair. And yet he did carry himself with power. He would be an energetic lover, if not a good one.

Ugh.
Was she really thinking about what Ken Karp might be like in bed? She’d been here far too long. Like everyone else.

Karp walked out of the interrogation room. He was coming up here, she knew. He liked to work detainees over and then leave them alone to imagine what their next punishment might be. “Let them stew,” he said. “Builds the dread.” As a psychiatrist, Callar had to agree. Anxiety twisted the mind, forced it in on itself. As a human being, she wasn’t so sanguine. Her own dread seemed to be getting worse.

Before Karp could reach the office, she walked into the hall, down the stairs that led to the steel front door of the barracks. When she stepped out, the late-winter sun caught her full in the eyes. She blinked, raised a hand to shield her face.

It was day. She’d forgotten.

S
even seventy-two Flores was an oversized Spanish colonial, two stories, red tile roof, thick white walls. In typical Southern California style, it nearly filled its lot. A steel-gray Toyota SUV sat in the narrow driveway along its left side.

The house lay in the heart of the prosperous and placid precincts of northern San Diego. To the west, closer to the ocean, homes were even now selling for millions of dollars. But 772 Flores didn’t fit with its neighbors. Blackout shades covered its windows. Brown patches dotted its front lawn. It looked like a foreclosure. But the loss at 772 went deeper than an unpaid mortgage.

Wells parked his rented Pontiac behind the Toyota. He reached for his Glock, tucked it under the driver’s seat. For this visit, he preferred to be unarmed.

The front door was heavy and oak, with an old-style brass knocker. A wooden sign proclaimed “Casa Callar.” No bell. Wells knocked solidly. But the house stayed dark. “Mr. Callar?”

Nothing. Wells heard faint music from upstairs. Classical, a mournful dirge.

“Mr. Callar?” Wells yelled. “Steven? It’s John Wells. I called last night.”

He knocked harder. Still nothing. Fine. He was sure Callar was inside. Wells would just have to wait.

He settled into the Pontiac and flicked on the satellite radio, the car’s main perk, flipping between the all-Springsteen channel and a couple of the alt-rock stations that played the stuff Anne had shown him on their night together. Death Cab for Cutie and The Hold Steady and the rest. Wells liked the songs, but they were too pretty for him, music for overage children whose biggest problems were drugs and love. Though even Springsteen had gone soft these days. Or just gotten old, the desperate anger of his early albums burning down to a quiet melancholy.

He’d listened twice more to the message Anne had left him, but he hadn’t called her. He figured that he’d wait until the mission was over to decide whether to see her again. Right now, though, he missed her, wondered where she was, what she was doing. He hadn’t wondered that about anybody except Exley for a long time. And he felt vaguely disloyal. But still he wondered.

 

 

AFTER A HALF HOUR,
the front door to 772 swung open. A man strode out, nearly running, holding a baseball bat loosely.

“Off my property. I’ll call the cops.”

You wanted to call the cops, you would have called them,
Wells thought. The guy was about six feet, with long arms, skinny and muscular. He looked like a pit bull kept hungry so he’d fight better. A barbed-wire tattoo knotted his right biceps. His hair was short and flecked with gray, his face long and flecked with pain.

“Mr. Callar? I’m John Wells. We spoke yesterday.”

Callar cocked his head sideways as if he’d caught Wells lying but couldn’t be bothered to argue. He lifted the bat, took a practice swing, a cutting, long arc that stopped just short of the Pontiac’s driver’s-side mirror.

“What would you do if I put a hole in your windshield?”

“It’s a rental.”

For a moment, Callar smiled, and Wells could see the man he’d been. Then the smile was gone. Callar walked back to the house. At the door, he tossed the bat aside, turned, looked at Wells. Waved him in.

The blackout shades left the house almost spookily dark. Callar led Wells into the kitchen. Wells could dimly see a chef’sisland, a brushed-steel fridge, tall, white cabinets. Given the messy front lawn, Wells imagined the house would be chaotic. Furniture upended in the dark, bugs underfoot. But when Callar flipped on the lamp on the counter and filled the room with the cool gray light of a compact fluorescent, Wells saw that the place was clean, plates and glasses neatly stacked in the cabinets.

Wells was reminded of a mausoleum. The house was carefully tended but lifeless, the mirror image of the Northern Cemetery. The great graveyard had been stolen by the living. Seven seventy-two Flores now belonged to the dead.

“Nice house,” Wells said.

“My wife had good taste. I’d offer you a drink, but the house is dry.”

“Water’s fine.”

Callar pulled a jug of water from the fridge and leaned against the kitchen counter. He took a long swig and wiped his mouth. He didn’t offer the jug to Wells.

“What exactly do you want to know, John? You don’t mind if I call you John. Seeing as you’ve come all this way in your rental Pontiac.”

“I want to hear about your wife.”

“Rachel. Her name was Rachel. Call her that, please.”

This meeting was already stranger, harsher, than Wells could have expected. “I want to hear about Rachel.”

“You want the fairy-tale version, how we met when she was a resident and I was a nurse and it was love among the crazies? For our first date we went to a Dodgers-Astros game. Jeff Bagwell hit a foul ball our way and I snagged it. And I’d never caught a ball before in my life, and I wanted it. But I gave it to this six-year-old three seats over because I wanted to impress her. And it worked, even though Rachel told me afterward she knew I only gave the kid the ball to show off. We were married two years to the day after that game. Or you want the real version, how she was dating this ER doc when we met? And she didn’t bother to tell me that until a month later, when the guy got up in my face. You want to know how we afforded this house? Shrinks do pretty well out here, all these rich housewives. Plus Rachel got a few bucks when her grandma died. You want to know her favorite color? What she called me in the middle of the night?” Callar had kept his dark eyes locked on Wells for this litany. Now, finally, he looked away.

“You don’t care about any of that. Not you or those FBI androids. They look human, but they’re not. All you want is how she died, yeah? How she looked when I found her on the bed with a plastic bag on her head? How she smelled after two days alone? Dead and alone? Because she sent me to Phoenix because she knew she was going to do it and she didn’t want me to interrupt her. That’s what you want to know.”

Callar was an open wound, pouring pain out with every word. Yet Wells couldn’t escape the feeling that he was watching a performance,
Bereaved Husband of a Suicide.
The guy was too furious to be so articulate. Or too articulate to be so furious. Or maybe he had just had too much time to chew his grief into mush, compose his feelings into this angry melody.

“Whatever you want to tell me,” Wells said.

“What I don’t get, man, what I don’t get is why you’re here at all. Seeing as how I told everything to the cops and the detectives. And then two days ago to these robots from the FBI. They left me their card and told me to call if anything occurred to me. If I remembered anything that could be useful in the investigation. Now you show up to kick some more dirt on it. John Wells. You don’t have anything better to do?”

“The FBI, they told you what happened. To the rest of the squad.” Wells hoping to keep Callar a little bit on track.

“Yeah. Before I kicked them out. You gonna take notes?”

“This is informal. I don’t have any authority.” Callar had probably guessed as much already, Wells thought.

“I can tell you to get lost whenever.”

“Sure.”

“Well, that calls for a drink.” Callar looked at a cabinet over the fridge.

“I thought—”

“I keep a little something on hand. For special occasions.” He clambered onto the counter and pulled open the cabinet, revealing a dozen bottles of Jack Daniel’s, the oversized square ones.

“Special occasions.”

“Empty, empty, empty . . .” Callar rooted through the cabinet. “Here we go.” He pulled down a half-full bottle, the brown liquid sloshing against the glass as though it wanted to escape.

“I didn’t offer this to the
federales,
but you strike me as at least half human,” Callar said. He slopped whiskey into a glass, stopping only when the brown liquid neared the rim. “This way if anyone asks, you been drinking, I say, just one or two a day.”

“Clever.”

“Say when.” Callar started to pour.

“When.” But Callar didn’t stop until Wells’s glass was as full as his own.

“In for a penny.”

“You want to get me arrested for a DUI.”

“You? Please.” Callar raised his glass. “Got a toast for us, John?”

“Just hoping it’s not spiked with rat poison.”

“That would be too easy.” Callar drank half his glass. Wells followed, wondering how far down the rabbit hole they would go this afternoon.

“Rachel was a shrink. Ever go to a shrink, John?”

The question surprised Wells. “Not really, no.”

“Not really or no?”

“No,” Wells said, lying. “How’d Rachel end up in the army?”

“The military has these programs, they give you extra cash during residency. You serve when you’re done. Money’s not great, but the benefits are nice. She signed up third year of residency, wound up in the reserves, and after the war started, she rotated in and out.”

“By choice.”

“Pretty much. You’re a doc in the reserves, especially a woman, you don’t want to go into a hot zone, army’s not dragging you over. It doesn’t look good.”