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.
16
Seven 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.