“I can't think of his name.” Gisela sighed, clearly a bit frustrated with herself.
Joule understood. The name of someone Sarah had talked to a couple of times wouldn't mean anything to a work roommate. Not, of course, until said roommate had gone missing for several days. Then suddenly it became important, but no one remembered.
“She went out with him a handful of times.”
“A boyfriend?” Joule nudged, hoping if she asked other things Gisela then might remember the name.
“I don't think so. They didn't go out on weekends, not like a date. And she never dressed up, I guess if anything she dressed down. I got the idea that it wasn’t just the two of them—Here!” Gisela pointed to a turn as Joule hit the brakes and made it.
She had set Gisela in charge of weaving them through their territory. She'd watched as Cage and Dr. Murasawa wound up checking out open space heading in toward the center of Texas. Others had made their way toward the border. But she and Gisela had taken a portion of the small town.
They drove small sparsely paved streets, often the only car out here. It wasn't as if there were enough people to produce actual traffic. Each time a car came from the other direction, both slowed as if understanding some kind of small road protocol.
The two women were trying to cover every street, wondering if Sarah had maybe parked at one of the houses. Joule drove slowly enough so they could check each car in each driveway. They hoped against hope to identify Sarah's. And they drove impossibly slow, enough to probably make the neighbors nervous.
“I want to say she went out mostly on Mondays and Thursdays.” Gisela huffed lightly again, clearly frustrated by her own lack of clean memory. “She would come home right from work. Sometimes one of us would catch a ride with her.”
Joule understood, they all lived together, and they worked together, so they often carpooled. She'd done it herself. “I’ll see if Dev knows anything about him.”
“Sarah would just change clothes and head right out the door—” Then Gisela interrupted herself. “Is that her car?”
It looked like it. Older and dustier, more beat up than Joule remembered, but it absolutely could be. Joule slowed to a stop and backed up so they could check it out. But she didn’t even get out of the car. “It’s a Texas state plate. Absolutely not Sarah's.”
Disappointment washed through her. She hadn’t expected it, hadn’t realized how excited she’d gotten even when she knew it likely wasn’t Sarah’s. Hope was resilient, even when it shouldn’t be.
“It's the right kind of car, though,” Joule added. “Even the right year or close to it. Let's make a note of where it is.”
“Even though it’s not hers?” Gisela asked, but then answered her own question even as she marked the location on her phone. “You think she swapped out the plates like a criminal?”
No, Joule thought, it would be worse than that. “I'm thinking if someone stole her car, they might have swapped the plates to cover for it.”
Gisela only nodded slowly, clearly not having thought like a criminal element about this before. Neither of them liked where the thought of Sarah's car being stolen would lead them, given that Sarah had not reported it and still had not reported in.
“Got it,” Gisela noted quietly.
“So, she was seeing the guy downstairs?” Joule asked. She didn't like to inject extra information hoping to get whatever Gisela might give her and put it together for herself. But since her companion seemed to have run out of things to tell her, she’d added the bit about 104.
“I don't know. Maybe. I think she did a couple of times.” They both continued looking out the windows, checking for cars or anyone or anything that might help. Gisela continued. “It didn't seem odd, you know? I just didn't think anything of it at the time. I haven't roomed with Sarah before. This is the first job I've worked with her, so I didn't know. Then she disappeared and everybody showed up and said this wasn't normal for her!”
A slight tremor under her voice revealed that the cold welcome of the early morning had not revealed the roommates’ true feelings about Sarah being missing. Gisela sniffed slightly. “Turn here. We'll zigzag these ones back and forth.”
Joule nodded, hanging a right onto the next street and then another right onto the next. Small houses divided the area, the space between them decent enough to indicate that the property values here were low.
Gisela offered more. Maybe, like Joule, she thought if she told everything, some tiny important detail might shake out. “She kept talking to one guy on the phone, and I think it's the person she was meeting. I mean, I can't say for sure. But he had a short, one-syllable name.” For a moment she turned and looked at Joule, as if to ask Did it mean anything to her?
Joule tried not to respond, not wanting to push anything but a one syllable name didn't mean anything to her. But wait. “Dev?”
“No, we know Dev. If it was Dev, I would have remembered. It was a different sound. Mal? Val?”
Something clicked, and Joule asked, “Sal?”