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.”
“Tell me more about the two of you.”
“First, I want to hear how you got involved in all this,” Callar said.
“Last week the CIA director, Vinny Duto, asked me to take a look. I’m getting up to speed. If you talked to the FBI last week, you probably know as much as I do about the case.”
“The FBI didn’t have time to tell me much before I kicked them out.”
“But you know, seven members of 673 are dead or missing. Professional hits. No leads, no suspects, no motive. The bureau is going on the theory it’s probably Qaeda. Qaeda or a detainee looking for revenge.”
“And you agree?”
“I can’t figure it out. None of it makes sense. But it started with your wife.”
“Rachel killed herself,” Callar said. “If you read the autopsy, the police report, then you saw. She took that Xanax and she lay down on her bed and put that bag on her head. And she died.”
“She have a prescription for the pills?”
Callar sipped his drink. “Sure. She was having a lot of trouble, anxiety attacks, insomnia. Ever since she got back from Poland.”
Wells decided to let that thread alone for now. “Police report says she didn’t leave a note.”
“Maybe she did. Maybe I burned it before I called the cops. Maybe she blamed me for being such a crappy husband.”
“Were you a crappy husband?”
“No.”
“Was there a note?”
“Listen to me. Listen. Nobody could have gotten those pills into Rachel if she didn’t want to take them.”
“How about the same nobody who’s killed soldiers and ops without leaving a clue? Maybe somebody shot her up with a sedative, liquid Xanax, dumped the pills down her throat.”
“Or maybe aliens landed from planet TR-thirty-six and killed her and flew off. It didn’t happen. She killed herself. You drag it up, rub my face in it.”