Joule stood over the body, still not quite processing what she saw. The parts of her brain that were working told her what to do. Her feet started to move.
She would walk a circle around it. See what she could see.
She found the head at one end. Curly hair, dark and dried, didn’t even move in the wind. Traces of sand had piled up around the body, and small bushes grew at the back of the knees and the front of the chest.
Had someone lay down here to sleep? Had they wound themselves in between the small shrubs on purpose, perhaps to hide as best they could? And they simply hadn't woken up?
The bad thought had already wormed its way into her brain. She tried not to think What if it was Sarah?
Taking a wide berth around the head, Joule tried not to worry about the face. In the distance, she saw her brother running toward her. Not thinking, she turned and looked back. Brooklyn was headed her way, too. She wanted to yell out and tell them don't run. Not in this heat.
They couldn't afford to have anyone pass out. They couldn’t carry anyone back.
Brooklyn had already carried the heavy kit this far. Someone would have to carry a box full of sand all the way back. And now there was a body.
Blinking heavily, Joule knew she was still too shocked to operate at full speed, but her next thought was wouldn't the police at least come out for this?
Then, please, don't let it be Sarah.
Though she and Cage had moved apart as they'd searched, he wasn't that far away.
“It's small,” he commented as he got closer, finally slowing his pace.
“It's desiccated,” Joule replied, not looking up. She wouldn't have described it as mummified. Nobody had wrapped it or preserved it in any way. “Don't they shrink when they dry out?”
Heavy breathing came from behind her. It was Brooklyn. “They don’t shrink that much,” the other woman added.
Joule turned, taking her gaze away from the hollows that had been eyes and the stretched gash that had once been a mouth. If it was Sarah, she wouldn't have recognized it. Which meant it still could be.
The body wore a T shirt and jeans shorts. But Brooklyn wasn’t done.
“Desiccation can change the organs and the skin, but the bones won't shrink. This person was too small in stature to have been Sarah.”
The confidence in Brooklyn's voice turned a key inside Joule’s chest and she almost cried as the feeling let loose. In her own mind she sarcastically reminded herself this was the Texas desert, and she couldn't afford to cry and lose the liquid.
How much should she trust Brooklyn's evaluation? She wondered. But right now, the answer was completely. If someone who knew something—and Brooklyn did—was telling her that this wasn’t Sarah, then Joule couldn't afford the emotional space to fight it.
“Who is it?” she asked.
“Could be anyone.” Brooklyn moved around the body, once again squatting down and seeming comfortable at ground level. Then she looked away over one shoulder to her right, then back to her left. “People pass through here a lot.”
“Cage saw people the other night out with Dr. Murasawa,” Joule volunteered.
“That doesn't surprise me. They take different routes around here.”
“It's not safe!” Joule burst out, maybe just glad that the conversation wasn’t about how this body could be Sarah.
“It's not,” Brooklyn agreed, looking up at Joule, her expression somber. “But you don't come through here unless this is safer than where you came from.”
The water is safer than the land, Joule thought again. What might drive a person to make a journey like this, knowing that a certain percentage of them simply wouldn't make it?
“Do we call the police?” Cage asked.
Brooklyn looked down at the body. “Yes, when we get in range of a signal, we can pin the location.”
Brooklyn stood up and they all held their phones high in the air again.
“I think we're going to have to go by distance and direction. This isn’t working,” Cage declared. “We know where the jacket is. We can lead somebody here.”
“Will they even care?” Joule asked, angry that she felt she had to.
“It's a body. Legally, they have to do something and, legally, we are going to get in a lot of trouble if we touch it,” Brooklyn warned.
Joule turned a circle again, her eyes scanning the area and this time she caught what she hadn't seen before. A flip-flop upside down about fifteen feet away. She'd seen the crushed water bottles and a gallon jug, all within eyeshot. Most had old labels, sunbleached and dirty. Bugs had likely made a home inside by now. There may have been fights for the last drops of water, Joule thought. She’d dismissed all of it as trash.
“Let's pace it off,” Brooklyn declared, then asked Cage, “Do we have any kind of tracking system?”
Even as she asked that, she was moving around the body snapping pictures, hundreds of them. From what Joule observed, she took them high, low, and from every angle, flash on, flash off, all the options.
“Do you want to try the luminol?” Joule asked.
“Well, it's back in the bag and I didn't bring it on purpose. If I did anything like that here, I could be brought up for contaminating evidence. Truly all we can do right now is look.”
It was Cage who pointed into the sky. “The sun's getting low. We need to head back.”
Joule wasn't looking forward to carrying the box of sand. But she couldn’t regret it either—anything that helped them find Sarah she would do the work for.
The other two turned and started back toward the car. Joule followed, hating the conclusions she was coming to.
Turning away from the body, she tried to sight a straight line to the jacket, then the shoe.
Which would mean Sarah was somewhere behind her now.
Alive or dead? None of them knew.
The flip-flop and water bottles, the bandana, and scraps of paper? They weren’t trash. They were a trail.