Joule stared at the officer, not able to believe what she was hearing.
Cage had insisted that she drive here; apparently, he'd had enough the past few days. That much she could understand. But she’d done it. Then she’d trekked across the parking lot that felt like a frying pan on the stove. They’d sat here for an hour and a half, the AC too cold and spotty at best.
And this was what they’d waited for?
“Yes, six weeks will be a good turn around time.” The officer looked at them with a blank expression that both conveyed he was bored with their questions and also thought they were crazy.
Cage nodded, but Joule was about to lose it. “Sarah will be dead by then.”
“Or not.” The counter answer was as ridiculously controlled as everything else the man had said.
Joule bit her tongue, not adding, if she isn’t dead already. Because if Sarah was still alive right now, the police and their slow investigation were going to make sure that she was dead before she was found.
The man had already told them that he could not and would not put any kind of “rush” on the order. That standard tracking and timeframes were all that was available to the police for an adult woman whose family still was unable to produce evidence of a struggle or harm or anything indicating that she'd left in any way other than voluntarily. The police would step up the investigation when that happened.
They had just given them the shoe, too. Since testing was—like this—six to eight weeks away, they were practically guaranteeing they would never put effort into the case. She tried to hold her frustration in check even as her fingers twitched. “What about the jacket?”
He tapped his pencil, even his answers were as slow as his work. “What makes you think it’s hers?”
“It looks exactly like her jacket.” Joule was about to grind her teeth. Beside her, Cage was silent and she suspected he was saving himself for when she finally blew up.
“Lots of jackets look the same.” He could not have cared less, and Joule was approaching boiling. “Do you have proof that it’s hers?”
The lightweight jacket was still out there, partially buried in the sand. Something they never would have found without the drones. They hadn’t touched it, so no, they didn’t have proof.
Before Joule could tell him that it was his job to get that proof, he asked, “Do you even know she was wearing it the night she disappeared? Because none of her roommates specifically watched her walk out the door so there’s no record from the people who were there of what she was wearing.”
He was jabbing at her, suggesting she had no clue what she was talking about because she hadn’t noted what Sarah wore each time she left the apartment. He knew Cage and Joule had come here to find their friend and he seemed irritated that he wasn’t able to simply ignore the case entirely.
This time he asked, “Do you know how many items of discarded clothing are out in the desert?”
She didn’t, but he only tapped the pencil again and his expression changed. “When was the last time you saw her before she disappeared?”
She almost spat out “Fuck you.” Because it had been a month. He knew that. She and her brother had sat down with him and given him all their information before, when she’d still believed he cared about the case. She used that now.
“Oh, my brother and I talked to you and your partner before. I would have thought you’d be smart enough to remember the answers and not ask the same things twice.”
With that, she gave up. Being decent wasn’t getting her anywhere so she might as well say what she wanted. She stood up and stalked out of the room, muttering “Have a ball sucking day, you complete fucknugget.”
Cage could offer any pleasantries he wanted, and it might be the better thing to do, but she was sheer out of fucks.
She nearly stomped down the hallway, pushing open doors with no concern who might be on the other side, until she emerged onto the creamy concrete that made a small patio at the front of the low, drab station. The heat assaulted her, but the change was welcome.
She could only say that Sarah had a jacket exactly like that and shoes exactly like what had been found and neither was in her room now. But she was all out of faith that it would mean anything to this asshat.
It didn't help that the jacket appeared to have maybe blown around a little bit, maybe hadn’t originally landed where they’d found it. It was certainly caught on a shrub now. Or at least yesterday, she could only hope that it was still there.
Between the coloring and the way it was partially under the sand, Joule was pretty sure that Mr. Walker hadn't seen it. Surely if he had recognized it as something belonging to his daughter, he would have called out yesterday.
With the drones connected into satellite feeds, Joule and Cage had come in and given the officer a set of coordinates of a ten foot by ten foot square where the jacket was. They’d done everything they could to make it easy, and she almost cried. No one cared.
The easy explanation was that Sarah had simply parked her car in the middle of nowhere and just walked away from her old life. But where would anyone go from that location? The officer had even suggested one of the other cars belonged to some man she was running away with. Joule could still almost bark out a laugh at the thought of Sarah doing that. She’d told them as much, but her word meant nothing to them. Less than nothing.
Cage came out next to her.
“Anything good?”
He shook his head. “He actually told me that the very fact that ‘we're testing the shoe shows that we're going above and beyond in this case’.”
Just when she thought she couldn’t be any more stunned. “This is above and beyond?”
“He sure thinks so.”
She knew he felt the same way she did. They were on their own in this. Joule now regretted giving the officer the information they’d gathered. They’d told him about the tire tracks on Salvador Torres’ old white chevy, they matched the images of the tracks next to Sarah's car.
At the time he’d seemed to make a note of it. But now, Joule was pretty certain he’d thrown all of it into the trash. In fact, when Joule mentioned that other tire patterns at the parking lot also matched tracks nearby, he hadn't even bothered to write down the two license plates she’d given him.
“Let’s go.”
Her brother’s voice compelled her into motion. They headed across the hot parking lot. It wasn’t made with black tar—as if they understood that would be a very bad idea—but it still reflected a day or more’s worth of heat at her. She could see it shimmying upward around her when she caught the angle right.
Sliding into the driver’s seat, Joule again wished she was the passenger. She liked being able to research things on her phone while she just rode along. Being a driver meant she had to pay attention, and that she was responsible. Not her favorite thing.
She turned the engine on before anything else, having already learned that getting the AC going as quickly as possible was more important than even her seat belt. Cage slid in beside her, the sound of his door closing sharp and harsh, letting her know that he felt as frustrated and angry as she did.
Somehow, he found a little more grace than she had. “Do you think that was awful because it’s Sunday?”
She shook her head. “I think we waited an hour and a half to get those shit answers because it's Sunday. But I think the answers are going to be shit regardless. It’s not like they were doing a lot of work through Friday.”
The AC blew at her, the fan already cranked to the highest setting. Though the air wasn't quite cool yet, it was definitely colder than the parking lot.
She closed her eyes to relax, and she could hear her mother’s voice telling her that being hot and then cold or cold and then wet, things like that, would make her sick. The evidence had come out since then, that it didn’t work like that. But right now, Joule thought she might be sick, and it was easy enough to write it off as going from the too-cold air conditioning of the police station to the outside dry heat of the parking lot and into the quickly cooling interior of the car.
She put her hands on the steering wheel but didn't go anywhere. “We have to pay to get the shoe sent out for DNA testing. Don’t we?”
“Do we? Can we?” Cage asked. “They have it and as much as they are doing exactly jack shit with it, I don’t imagine they’ll hand it back to us. Or even let us do our own tests. We have to get the jacket and test that, I think.”
Joule backed out of the parking lot. At least she and her brother almost always wound up on the same page. That was a comfort in the worst of times.
But Cage was still talking. “I’m really concerned that we found another piece of Sarah's clothing . . .”
“At least it's a jacket and not a shoe.” She shrugged and aimed the car back toward the little house.
He frowned at her.
“It’s not as essential,” she countered.
“But it is,” he said. “When the desert gets cold at night it may be even more so than the shoe.”
Joule felt the shudder run down her spine. “We should get the jacket.”
He only nodded and looked out the window.
They hadn't even seen it in person, only on the review of the drone footage. So maybe there was more evidence there.
“Should we go now?” she asked, ready to turn the car the other direction.
He put his hand out onto her arm. “There's something we need to do first.”