Another thing that bothered Auggie was that Lender’s timeline had shifted so dramatically. At the beginning, Lender and the Ozark Volunteers had pressed Auggie to tell them where Robert was. They’d been frantic. They’d been desperate. Then Lender had vanished for almost a month, and he’d come back looking rested and relaxed. He’d still wanted to know about Robert, but it had been . . . almost casual. Like Lender just wanted to close the book. And now, Lender and the Ozark Volunteers had a timeline again: two weeks.
What had changed?
Auggie searched the Wahredua Police Department and found Albert Lender. He ran Lender’s full name through Google. He found a lot of results for financial lenders, and a few entries about a Modernist architect, and a single news story out of Kansas City, a 2010 piece that listed Albert Lender among participants in an elite counter-terrorist training program the state was running.
“What’s the newspaper in Wahredua?”
“The Courier,” Theo said. “Why?”
“I want to see if they have any stories about Lender.”
“They don’t have a digitized archive. Trust me: I already checked.”
“Do they have a website? Like, a digital version of the newspaper?”
“Yes.”
Instead of trying to navigate the Courier’s clunky website, Auggie just did a site-limited search on Google. He hit gold on the fourth entry.
“Holy shit,” Auggie said. “Read this.”
Accepting the phone, Theo studied the screen. After a moment, he said, “So on September 19th, Lender has a big arrest. Supposedly this woman he’s picked up is a big player in the Ozark Volunteers, and blah blah blah, everything is finally going to get better. Then a few days later she’s released. What am I supposed to think about this?”
“Lender and the Ozark Volunteers are both freaking out about Robert. They’re both trying to figure out where he is, because they both want this flash drive and whatever’s on it. Blackmail, I guess. Or something along those lines.”
“Ok,” Theo said. “That’s a little bit of a jump, but I don’t have a better explanation.”
“Then Lender hauls this woman in, supposedly she’s a big deal, and she gets out of jail a couple of days later when the charges are dropped. The next time I see Lender, he’s not really in a rush. He wants to know where Robert is, but he’s not on a strict timeline.”
“And you think the arrest was a way to put pressure on the Volunteers. Lender gets them to admit they don’t have Robert. He’s worried they had the blackmail, or whatever is on that flash drive, but once he knows they don’t have it either, he can be more careful, move more slowly.”
“The Ozark Volunteers stopped showing up too. My guess is that Lender threatened them and told them to stay away from this.”
“So why does it all start up again?” Theo asked.
“I don’t know. There’s pressure again. A timeline. Two weeks.”
“What’s causing the pressure? What happens in two weeks?” Theo asked.
“I don’t know.”
Theo tossed Auggie’s phone back onto the bed, picked up his own and placed a call. He spoke in a low voice, laughing occasionally, and then he stood and moved into the bathroom and shut the door. Auggie tried to eavesdrop, but then Theo turned on the shower, and the white noise of the water blocked out the conversation.
Auggie tapped his phone’s screen. Hard.
He couldn’t find any more local news articles that might explain what had changed recently for Lender, and after a few more minutes, he gave up. He went back to Robert’s Instagram account, scrolling through it, checking faces. Les, the man from Frozen King the night before, showed up in several of the posts. And, now that Auggie was looking for patterns in the faces, he noticed a girl showing up in the pictures over and over again. Bottle blond hair, a preference for denim cutoffs and white tank tops. She was probably close to Robert’s age, early twenties. She had hard eyes and a hard mouth even when she smiled.
The bathroom door opened, and Theo came out.
“Who was that?” Auggie said.
When Theo looked over at him, Auggie blushed.
“Turns out,” Theo said, “there’s currently a lot of questions coming down from the State Attorney General’s office. They haven’t said anything outright, but my buddy thinks a public corruption investigation is already in the works. Unofficially, the word is that someone is coming down at the end of next week to poke around.”
“Someone is looking at Lender,” Auggie said. “And he’s got to find that blackmail and make it disappear. I mean, he needed to do it anyway, but now he’s got people that are going to dig up everything in his life. If they find it first, he’s in deep shit.”
“Sounds about right,” Theo said. “Once the machine gets rolling, if this is a real investigation, they’ll uproot his entire existence. That’s probably why we’ve got a two-week deadline: they want us to find it before the investigation really gets going.”
“And the Volunteers have to move fast because Lender is moving fast, and they don’t want him to find it first.” Auggie hesitated, tried to make his voice normal. “So that was your buddy, the one who’s a cop. What’s his name again? Cart?”
“Auggie.”
“It’s just a question.” His face was hot again. “Anyway, look at this: I think this girl might be Robert’s girlfriend. Maybe he left the flash drive with her.”
“Hold on,” Theo said, shoving his feet in his sneakers and grabbing his coat. “I’ll be
