Joule jerked upright at the sound of a rough cough. She was acting as if she’d been caught in some bad act, but she was sticking to Sarah’s side of the room.
In the doorway, the three roommates crowded, looking in at the twins’ handiwork.
It was Gisela who spoke. “We called Dev. We thought he might know something we didn’t.”
Her voice sounded almost accusatory, and Joule stilled, waiting. Her fingers still holding the pair of pants she’d pulled from the bottom drawer. The drawer of long sleeves and pants looked unused, and given the heat, that made sense.
She wasn't surprised when Gisela added, “Dev said you were in town.”
Cage nodded. “Checking was smart.”
Gisela’s strict expression stayed in place. Clearly, she was not quite done. “Can we see your IDs?”
“Of course!” Joule replied, reaching for the small backpack now slung across one shoulder and out of the way. Cage quickly pulled his from his pocket, though Gisela frowned and held it right back out after one glance. “It says Nathaniel Mazur.”
“Oh, that’s my dad’s.”
Joule tried to hide how her heart clenched. Cage was still carrying it, right there next to his own ID. He scrambled to switch the two.
The three women passed the driver's licenses around while Joule stayed mostly motionless, though she tried to hold her chin up so they could see her face clearly.
Then the IDs were back in Gisela’s hands and she was holding them out. “We have to go to work—”
“We have to,” Brooklyn added, emphasizing the same argument everyone else had given.
Joule nodded, not quite sure where this was leading, until Brooklyn added, “We're glad someone's looking for Sarah.”
“Someone needs to be. The police aren't. And so far, they won’t let us off work, in part because we don’t even know where to go.” Amber crossed her arms and looked away, clearly upset at the situation.
Joule wondered just how much they had looked for their missing roommate. Was it everything they could do? Or enough to assuage their own guilt at losing her? At not knowing Sarah better than they apparently did?
Joule added, “They seem to think she left of her own accord.”
Gisela nodded somberly and added, “I didn't know her very well, but she didn't seem like someone who would do this.”
“She wasn’t.” Joule said it staunchly . . . until she realized what she’d said. “She isn’t.”
It had been three days. They were already well outside the golden forty-eight-hour window. Had they already lost their chance to find Sarah alive?
She felt the cold squeeze in her heart—the one that said something bad was coming. Joule ignored it like a champ.
Gisela looked at Joule first, meeting her eyes before turning to Cage. “You can stay, but you have to lock the front door when you leave. I want to tell you not to look through our things—”
Amber looked quickly to the floor then. Amber had been very clear they were not supposed to look through her things. Maybe that was what the argument was about. Gisela added, “But if it helps you find Sarah . . . then look wherever you need to. Just don't toss the place like an FBI raid!”
“Of course not,” Cage told them. He shook his head and waved his hand around as if to reassure the women the twins knew what they were doing.
They didn’t.
He had that way about him that put people at ease, even when he didn’t deserve it. He asked, “Is there a number we can reach you at?”
Smart. Joule thought, she hadn't thought of that.
“That way we can text you when we lock up. We can send pictures of anything we find. Maybe even ask you if we find something—if it was Sarah’s or if it means anything to you.”
“That would be great,” Amber said as she handed over her phone number. She was now fully dressed and clearly ready for a day on a solar farm or building a small dam. Joule couldn't tell which.
Joule quickly recorded all the data. “We'll stay in touch. Thank you so much.”
With that, they were left alone in a stranger's apartment.
She turned to her brother. “We need to photograph everything. Because we don't know what's important. Not yet.”
“Good point.”
About an hour later, her phone was full of pictures. Her head was full of nothing. She asked her brother, “Any ideas?”
He only shrugged. “It looks like she went somewhere. But I can't tell if she went to work, or if she went out with friends. Everything seems to be here. You would know better than me.”
Joule had roomed with Sarah on several of the jobs they'd done for Helio Systems Tech. “This just looks like Sarah. It's neat, reasonably well organized. She always seemed to leave a few things on the end of the bed. This is all typical for her.”
It had been a while. “I don't know what her favorite shoes are. Or if this pair of boots—” she pointed to a neat row of shoes just beyond the dresser, “—are her only work boots. Does that mean she wasn’t going to work? Or maybe it’s a second pair and she disappeared right after a day on site.”
Cage didn’t have an answer.
“Maybe this isn't where we find anything,” Joule conceded. “She took her car. She seems very much to have left here of her own free will.”
“But none of the roommates have any idea where she could have gone.” Cage clearly felt the same frustration.
“According to Dev,” Joule pointed out. She remembered her own interrogation at the hands of the sheriff's deputies. They’d asked the same questions repeatedly, hoping for a change in answers or a different wording that gave something away or revealed a gap in memory. “We need to ask again.”
“Right now, the roommates are at work. But we can check with the neighbors.” He closed Amber’s closet door, having found nothing there either.
They didn’t lock the door behind them as they headed out onto the front landing that ran the entire length of the upper story. They knocked politely at first, then pounded on doors, though most yielded nothing. One woman seemed angry about “those kids and their noise,” though Joule suspected from the woman's demeanor that she was just mostly angry in general.
The door next to hers yielded nothing, and they headed downstairs as Joule made a mental note to make sure they locked the apartment before they drove off.
The first two doors were answered, but neither the harried young father nor the old man recognized Sarah’s picture. But at the third door, they found an older woman.
“Yeah, I know her. I mean I saw her a lot.” She handed Cage’s phone back to him after putting her glasses on to check the picture. “I don’t know her name or anything, but she walked by my window plenty.”
The upstairs had a small landing. The lower floor had a short patio that ran the length of the building. Not enough for chairs or any kind of patio, it was barely big enough for the twins to walk along. But the gravel bed with scrub planted in it meant this was the only path to the other apartments unless someone walked through the weeds at the end of the building.
Joule leaned in. “Do you know where she was going?”
“I think she was visiting the guy next door.”
“Often?”
“I don't know. I don't keep track!” The woman was getting irritated, but Joule figured a person was missing and they could all suck it up. Or did she think maybe they were blaming her for something?
“We’re trying to find her. She’s missing.” People could be so frustrating, and Joule tried not to heave a sigh.
“Oh. Maybe twice a week?”
“Do you remember what time of day?” Cage added, maybe stepping in and smoothing things over.
“Evenings?”
She’d said it as a question, but it was an answer, Joule thought. Probably something Sarah had done after work. Someone she saw regularly. Did he also work for Helio Systems Tech? Several of the units were supposed to house the workers. But Murasawa would have questioned the person then, wouldn’t she?
Cage thanked the older woman profusely, his kindness outweighing her sourness—a skill Joule would have liked to master. She tended to respond to sour with more sour.
The woman was clearly done with them. She’d done her diligence and needed to get back to the iced tea warming on the coffee table behind her or the TV that had been running the whole time.
As the door clicked, the twins looked to each other. Without a word, they headed next door to apartment 104.