“There's nothing unusual here.” Joule was more than disappointed to report that. In fact, it was the only report they'd been hearing all evening.
The houses in the area had showed all kinds of things. People inside making dinner. One man with more dogs than they could count. A family that looked like they might be too many people in a house . . . but they were just a family with a lot of members. Nothing strange on the heat gun.
No one being held hostage.
It caught Joule for a moment. Would Cage be up and around in his new holding? Making dinner, acting as if he were part of a family? She didn’t think so. And she didn’t think any of these houses were the right one. If there was one.
Somehow the little team had managed to not get caught out with their heat guns. Mostly they snuck around. One time a man had come out the front door and Amber had apparently told him she was measuring the moisture of native species of plants for her school project. Gisela had commented, “This girl bullshitted the plant species and explained moisture in a way that was . . . so so wrong.”
But the man had invited them to bring their “moisture guns” into the yard and check out all the flora. There had been no fauna in the house other than him.
The houses here were far enough apart, scattered on the land, so that they could mostly see inside with relative ease. They didn’t have to get too close, which was good, because a lot of the houses had dogs. Big, guard dogs.
Joule had felt her heart race, and she reminded herself that she had nothing against dogs. The Night Hunters weren’t dogs.
The walkie talkie crackled, and Gisela’s voice came through. Joule, Kayla, and Ivy each held their heads down close to their devices, listening closely to make up for the dropout due to the distance between them. “Are we missing them because they're in a basement somewhere. Cinderblock construction would block these things, right?”
“I don't think the houses around here have basements,” Amber mentioned back.
Figuring that was an easy check, Joule pulled her phone out and began a search before she remembered, no cell service. Still, she held the phone up into the air once again in case it had miraculously appeared.
It occurred to her then that no one in their group was native to the area. Sarah, Cage, and Aurora certainly weren't from here. Kayla and Ivy were from the same neighborhood that she and Cage were. She didn't know where Gisela, Amber or Brooklyn were from, but she knew that they had moved here with Helio Systems Tech for the job. And Malcolm and Aurora Walker were not from the area either.
Shitballs. Maybe they should have gotten Jacob McQueeny, or at least Kathryn. There were questions that should be answered. But with no service, there was no way to call her now. They kept going. Joule tucked Amber’s “school project” idea away in case she, too, got called out. It wouldn’t hurt if the neighbors all got the same fake story. They might not check into it if they’d all helped out “the nice kids working on that plant moisture project.”
The area wasn't that big. Disappointingly, the houses all checked out. None had any heat signatures indicating extra people. Aside from two different people in their bedrooms—teenagers?—there was not even a single indication of a hostage. And Joule didn’t think they had basements.
“Do we come back? Try again tomorrow?” Another voice had tuned in. Dr. Murasawa this time. That meant they had checked all the houses on their list and hadn’t found anything of value or even interest either.
“Cage and Aurora were picked up around 2am. It's barely seven. It's just now dark. Do we think they could have gone out this early?” Dr. Murasawa’s voice asked when no one had really answered her first question.
They’d picked now specifically because they’d thought this would be a good time to find them at home. Like she said, the runs seemed to be happening in the middle of the night. It matched with when Cage and Aurora disappeared, and Sarah, too. When they thought they’d seen Cage on the satellite image Kayla had found.
“What if we’re wrong? What if the runs are happening earlier?” Joule voiced that out loud now, into her walkie talkie. “What if Cage and Aurora were picked up on a return trip?”
Amber chimed in. “Could they have left this early? They were coming back around two to three a.m.? It would be a lot of hours out in the desert.”
Joule didn’t get the impression that the health or comfort of the kidnapped was a real concern. She pushed her worries about what was happening to her brother aside in order to stay focused.
“Maybe the schedule just varies,” David put in. “Honestly, if I were running a cartel—”
Joule almost laughed. It was a thought she'd had herself a handful of times over the past several days.
“I wouldn’t be running at the same time every night and I wouldn’t be running in the same direction. I’d have a complex series of paths and exchange points that varied. Different pick-ups and drop-offs. Consistency could get them caught.”
That, Joule had not thought about. She had thought more about the treatment of the prisoners than the planning of the business. “It's possible then, that we're not finding the people because they're already out of the house?”
“It’s entirely possible,” David said back. No one argued the point.
Did they simply wait another day?
There had been so many days that she waited, so many days that her organs ate away at themselves with worry and inaction.
“Well, if we can't find them this way, then how about we get drones up?” Malcolm said.
“What are we looking for?” David asked, but even as he asked it, Joule could hear the soft noises in the background of the drones getting readied.
“We need to reconvene. We have nine people and three drones.” Kayla had clearly calculated it and didn’t expect to have to explain more to this group. It took a bit of walking to get them all into one point, but she was right. Three sets of eyes on each of the screens was better.
She and Joule grouped with David. Ivy and Amber decided to follow Dr. Murasawa and her drone. Gisela and Brooklyn went with Malcolm, who said to the group, “Definitely people, if we can find them. We need to start with where the original footprint sets end.”
The night that Cage and Aurora disappeared, the trail had ended near here. It was the whole reason they were here, just outside of San Antonio. It wasn’t even a town, just a cluster of houses far on the outskirts, far more desert than suburb. It didn't even have a name. Anyone watching them on the satellite would see the influx of their cars and think it was either a party or something was up.
They would see the people walking around. But Joule didn't really care.
“We’ll have to drive out to start where those footprints ended.” And it wouldn’t be the easiest drive. They’d brought only the cars that were the biggest, with the broadest wheelbases and the widest tires. The ones best suited for driving in the desert. Even so, they were likely ruining the cars and it was slow going.
Every moment they crawled along hurt. Even when they arrived, Joule wanted to dive in and go, but it took a while to get the three small teams coordinated. The only reason Joule didn’t have a fit was because she knew they were doing the right thing the right way. And because it was how Cage would have done it.
The three drone drivers discussed which direction they would go and what exactly they were looking for. The way David and Dr. Murasawa spoke with Malcolm gave Joule hope that he truly had gotten better at it. They clearly trusted him with the job.
The others, still equipped with their thermal guns—Joule included—held them up and began looking for anything.
She found the faint glow of a snake, not warm blooded, but still retaining a little bit of the day's heat. Another blob of glow darted across the screen. She hadn't seen it with her eyes, but with the more sensitive heat gun, she’d found a small mammal out here making its way.
There were no people.
She aimed her sensor toward the horizon, wondering if it might catch a group. Some little flair on the screen that would tell her someone was out there.
Then, the drones were in the air. The operators following along, eyes on the screens. Two handlers each watching out for snakes and scorpions, things to trip over, and scanning the horizon for anything to investigate.
It was almost two hours later before Malcolm called out over the walkie talkies. “I've got something!”