“What the hell?” Joule ran toward the door but stopped short as the loud banging came again.
She’d been happy to set up shop here and wait out the neighbor, but what was this?
Cage stayed where he was, peering out the window over the kitchen sink as if he might be able to see who was on the other side of the door. But from where she stood—looking back and forth between her brother and the angry door—the angle looked wrong.
Pressing her face to the peephole, she saw an older man and woman. The man's tight black curls were cropped close to his head and graying. Lines on his face made the woman next to him look noticeably younger. Her hair was pulled back into a low poof of a ponytail, her edges neat. The deep brown eyes and wide mouth triggered a memory in Joule.
She threw the door open, but she didn't get a word out.
“Sarah!” the man yelled into the empty space of the apartment behind her.
The woman, however, stopped and looked Joule up and down. “Do you know where Sarah is?”
Joule shook her head.
“Are you Brooklyn?” the woman asked as if she knew she had the wrong name already.
“Joule,” she said, holding her hand out, but the woman didn't grab it.
As her husband pressed by, barging his way into the apartment, she exclaimed “Joule!” and engulfed her in a huge hug. When she finally stepped back, she said, “I'm so glad you're here. You're not here though, are you?”
She seemed to realize right away that she had asked a ridiculous question and tried again. “I thought you and your brother weren't working on this job.”
“We aren't. Dev told us Sarah was missing and we came right down.”
The woman braced her hands on Joule’s shoulders, holding her at arm's length as if to inspect a child. “Of course, you did. Where are my manners? I'm Aurora Walker. This is—that was—my husband, Malcolm.”
“This is Cage.” Joule stepped back and motioned to him through the open doorway into the kitchen. “These are Sarah's parents.”
At least the woman was still there to greet him. Sarah’s father had disappeared into the unit, banging through every door and calling out as though Sarah might simply be under the bed or hiding in a closet like a wayward child.
“We just spoke with the police,” Aurora told her.
“Oh, good!” Cage entered the conversation as he held his hand out to say hello. But he, too, was engulfed in a superhuman hug.
As Joule watched, he accepted it more gracefully than she did. He hugged the woman back, a fierce tight hold that told her that her brother needed it as much as Aurora did.
“What did you find out from the police?” he asked when he was finally let go.
“A whole bunch of bullshit!” The voice boomed from behind them.
Joule and Cage turned to look at Malcolm as he stood with his hands braced on his hips as if to say she's not here. As if he were the only one who didn't already believe that.
But he continued, “They can't find her car, but they aren't putting any manpower on it. They've issued a BOLO, but I'm not sure what good that is. They said they're going to come interview people, but they haven't done it yet—”
“It's been three days!” Joule cried out. She hadn’t meant to interrupt but, what about the golden forty-eight-hour window? Was it just a myth? Or did they truly not care that a woman had gone missing?
Aurora tipped her head, hands on her own hips, as if to say, isn't that the way it always is? though her words spoke a different story. “They said they're a small station. They don't have the manpower to look for someone without evidence that she's missing against her will.”
That, Joule knew, was the problem: They didn't know if Sarah had gone off on her own volition or not. None of them did.
Was she safe? Was she in trouble? Was she already dead?
The last one put a shiver in Joule’s bones.
“Then it's up to us,” Cage said, “to find something that will make them have to look.”
Tears fell from Aurora’s eyes. Her tight smile stretched from one side of her face to the other, conveying all her conflicting emotions at once. “I'm so glad you're here. Thank you.”
Joule hadn't realized how much Sarah must have told her parents about her roommates. For a moment a rush of sadness swept through her that she didn’t have that option herself. Aurora hadn't even asked who Dev was, she already knew.
The good news was that their little team had just doubled.
“We have the slightest tremor of a lead,” Cage told them.
As Malcolm's eyes snapped to him, hope shined in the deep brown of his irises.
“There's a guy downstairs who's not answering our questions. I want to see if we can get his license plate and figure out who he is.”
Joule jumped in. “Sarah was apparently walking down to his apartment to see him a couple of times a week—”
“She didn't have a boyfriend,” Aurora said suddenly, firm in her knowledge that if Sarah had had a boyfriend, she would know.
Joule didn't comment. She didn’t know if that would be true or not. But she didn’t get to think about it.
“I’m hoping he’ll leave soon, and we can follow him to get whatever that will tell us.” Cage looked between them. Now there were four to make the decisions.
“Like that?” Malcolm asked as he pushed past them, stepping up to the kitchen window and pointing at an old sedan as it pulled out of the parking lot and turned onto the dusty road.