AN: I thought I was going to write the end of this story and that would be it for this iteration of Stephanie, and Ranger. Then last night, I was lying in bed, and I had a really freaking cool idea, if I do say so myself. It may be a while before it gets up, but I have worked out the plot and now I just have to bring it to life. I'm focusing on Saturday right now, but I'm excited about starting something new!

We texted Joe, and he turned the camera back on and had the cab turn around under the pretext that Molly forgot something in the restaurant. But whoever had been across the street was gone. Joe went to the alley and checked for any kind of evidence, but there was nothing but the usual garbage and the usual debris you don't want to think about in the alleyway of a major city. Molly was back, and neither Ranger nor Joe were comfortable with her hanging out on the street for too long. So they called it a night, while Rangeman Boston was sent to look to sort through the grossness in the alley.

"You're sure it was Dickerson?" I asked Abby.

"I'm positive."

Ranger called Hector and told him to enhance the images from the alley, but what we got back wasn't great. The man had the same build as Dickerson, maybe a little thinner, and maybe he had a beard, but we couldn't make out much more. Ranger told Hector to do what he could with each individual frame from the alley, and I looked at what we had.

"I've known Waldo Dickerson for most of my life," Abby said. "I know how he stands, I know how he moves, and I've seen him with long hair and a beard before on more than one occasion. I know that was him."

"Abby," I said. "He can't possibly be alive. He was stabbed, shot, and hit over the head, and vacuumed. He can't have survived all of that. He just can't. I was there for the shooting and vacuum sucking. I don't mean to be insensitive, but he's super dead."

"I know that was him," Abby said.

I looked at Ranger, "Joe did say he expected there to be more ick on the inside of the mould."

"Mould? What mould?" Abby asked.

"He was tied to a machine that makes plastic vacuum moulds at this Halloween prop factory."

Abby laughed and covered her mouth; the relief was evident in her face. "What?" I said.

"He's not dead."

"What don't we know?" I asked.

"A few years ago, Wally did a favour for a friend. They wanted a realistic mould of a human body that they could use to make Halloween props. They cast him in plaster, made a rubber body of him and then made a plastic mould. Wally had them make an extra one so he could have some fun with one of his middle school classes."

"Are you saying he led me to that factory so he could stage his death?" I asked.

"What happened?" She asked, "What happened exactly?"

I filled her in on everything, minus the Dracula bits. "Greg Neudendorf said that Mr. Dickerson knew I was following him and went to Neudendorf to get help ditching me."

"That weasel?" Abby said. "No way Wally goes to him for help."

"Why?" I asked.

"He hates the bastard."

Ranger's phone rang, and he told us to carry on. I got Abby a glass of wine, and she sat on the sofa where Ranger had been sitting.

"Why does he hate Neudendorf?" I asked.

"Greg was a sophomore when we were seniors at Linton. He'd been hot shit on his high school baseball team, but he wasn't up to our school standards, and instead, because of the fraternity he rushed, he managed to get a job working with the team. On paper, he was basically a glorified batboy. In reality, his purpose in life was to keep the players happy. He did everything from write term papers to sneaking girls into their hotel rooms when they were on the road. If someone's GPA dipped too low, Greg was the one who did the extra credit work to bring it back up. The whole school knew that's what he was doing, the professors knew, the administration knew. Nobody cared because the baseball team brought much-needed publicity and, more importantly, revenue into the school."

"What did he get in return?"

"Money," Abby said. "What else?"

"And Mr. Dickerson didn't like that?"

"No," Abby said. "And neither did I, frankly. After a while, Greg started to think that because he was compensated by the team, that he was due the same sort of attention the players got from girls. We'd go to parties, and he'd think he was entitled to the cast-off Baseball Annies. On more than one occasion, Wally and a couple of the other guys had to put Greg in his place for not taking no for an answer. He tried to corner me once, and after I nailed him in the gonads, I reported him to the school. They came down on him pretty hard because, at the time, Wally was the star of the team, and they didn't want him angry. Greg was looking at getting fired or suspended, but someone stepped in, and he went from being this arrogant little shit to this slimy, obsequious, little worm. He stayed away from Wally and me, though."

"So if Mr. Dickerson needed help," I said. "Who would he go to?"

"Besides me?"

"Yeah," I said.

"Calvin Darren," Abby said.

"They still keep in touch?" I asked.

"Since Wally started going to the school to help Sadie with her math," Abby said. "They've rekindled their friendship and have gone out for a few beers together when Wally was in Boston to see Sadie."

"Would Darren know anything about the prop warehouse?"

"Yeah, maybe," Abby said. "Wally loved that sort of stuff; I bet he told a lot of people about it."

"Look," I said. "You have to level with me. I know that Mr. Dickerson told you everything; does this have to do with the cheating back in the day?"

"Yes," Abby said. "It has everything to do with it, but when he disappeared, he didn't know why it was coming up again."

"What happened? I've heard a few versions, but you were right there."

"It started long before that stupid bet on Shoeless Joe," Abby said. "I guess it started in our Junior year. What you have to understand is that Waldo Dickerson's first love wasn't me, or Bernadette, or Baseball or even Abby. It's statistics. I know that sounds really fucking weird, but it's true. Election night for him is basically porn. He gathers all the data he can and sits glued to the tv. He likes to see if he can beat the networks in their predictions. You know when you're with a guy who is passionate about something, as weird as it may seem, it becomes oddly endearing? That's what it was like when I was with Wally."

Ranger's weird endearing quirk was his obsession with stalking me. Annoying at first, but now endearing and had proven useful on more than one occasion. "Yeah, I get it."

"In our sophomore year, when he started noticing anomalies in the team statistics. He ran all sorts of predictive tests on it, and he couldn't figure out what was wrong. He kept track of player stats on his own, you see, and nothing made sense. He recognized that a handful of players weren't playing their best every time. I mean, sure, you can write that off to an off day or a guy slacking for whatever reason. He brought it to the coach, and he had a chat with the team. He said things like, there's no honour in making another team look better by not living up to the full team's potential. In fact, it was insulting. Things picked up, and things started to look better, but still, Wally was obsessed with the idea that these guys weren't playing right. So when Shoeless Joe came up at that party, he made that bet as a way to call the guys out."

"What happened?" I asked.

"At first nothing," Abby said. "Or at least we thought nothing. We lived on campus then, the team had a house that was basically a frat house, and I lived in the dorms across campus. A lot of the time, Wally slept in my room with me because it was quieter. On the nights before games, the whole team was on strict curfew, and a chaperone stayed in the house, so everyone was sober and went to bed early. One weekend my roommate was supposed to go away for the weekend, and I told Wally that I was going to stay at the library until she cleared out, and then I was going to lock myself in my room, with the phone off of the hook until game time the next day. I stayed at the library until it closed, and then I went home. When I walked in, two guys grabbed me, tied me to the bed, and trashed my room."

"What were they looking for?" I asked.

"Nothing. They just wanted to scare the hell out of me, and it worked. Before they left, one of them held a gun to my head and told me to close my eyes. If I opened them, he was going to shoot me. I kept my eyes closed. They shoved a gag in my mouth, I heard what sounded like a camera, and then I heard my door close and the guys locked up. Since everyone knew I didn't want to be disturbed, nobody came looking for me until after the game the next day. Wally had realized I wasn't in the stands and thought I had lost track of time. I tried not to miss games, but when I had a paper due, he understood if I put school first, and it wasn't the first time I'd skipped a game to write a paper or study. He didn't think anything of it until he got home and on his bed were half a dozen polaroids of me tied up and the key to my dorm room. He called the police and ran over to my room and freed me."

"You have no idea what these guys looked like?"

"Nope," she said. "I was too scared to open my eyes for a long time after they left the room. I was convinced I could hear someone breathing in the room for hours afterward. But that was impossible because I didn't hear anyone open the door again until Waldo came into the room."

"And the police had no clues?"

"Oh, they had clues. The idiots had taken pictures of themselves in the fucking muppet heads. The police confiscated the costumes, but they couldn't get anything useable from them because they had been used during the game and by who knew how many other idiots on campus since their last cleaning. No charges were ever pressed, but when I went back to school the next week, I found a note in my math textbook telling me to tell Wally to back off or next time would be worse."

"Did you show the note to Mr. Dickerson or the police?"

"I showed it to Wally," she said. "He said he'd drop it, and we moved off campus into a place of our own. Then he heard someone bitching about the team not covering the spread. He realized what was going on, and he reported them. I begged him not to, but he said he had to. Then he was almost killed in that accident, and the threats didn't stop coming. It came to a head just after I brought him home. Someone had been in our apartment while I was picking him up from the hospital. And we learned it wasn't the first time. There were dozens of pictures of me, some of me sleeping on the sofa in our apartment. The police came, took photos of the place, they looked for evidence and didn't find any except for a camera in the smoke detector. Of course, the camera was untraceable. A week later, I was put on academic probation for missing too many classes while my fiancé was in the hospital. I knew that the University wasn't going to protect us. Darren, well, excuse the metaphor, but he went to bat for us, and he got the probation removed, but I couldn't take it anymore, and Wally just wouldn't let it go.

I dropped out of school because I was too afraid to go, and then one night I got into my car, it wouldn't start, and I freaked out, convinced the fucking muppets had done it. It wasn't, the car was just twenty years old. I broke up with Wally that night. A friend of mine had a place in Queens and she took me in. I met my husband about six months later. Six months after that, I found out I was pregnant with Sadie. I didn't see or hear from Wally again until after 9/11."

"I'm sorry, I have to ask," I said. "If you knew that Sadie was working with his math and that it was the source of all of the issues twenty years ago, why would you let her keep going with it?"

"Because the guys involved in that shit show are no longer at the university, well except Greg, but they never proved he was part of the scandal back then."

"Do you think he may have organized all of this because he's afraid of losing his job if Sadie vindicated Mr. Dickerson through her math?"

"Greg is a smart guy, but he's not cunning. He doesn't have the cajones to terrorize Wally."

"When did they start back up? Was it after Sadie found his math?"

"No," Abby said. "It started about a year before Sadie started up where he left off. He said Bernadette had come home and found some Muppet Baby comic books in their mailbox. She thought it was a joke or a mistake or something like that. She's so fragile; any stress can set her off, so he didn't say anything. He brought them to me and had me put them away in the safe in my house, just in case. We went over everything he was doing that may have ticked them off. We couldn't think of anything except for helping a kid with his fantasy baseball stuff. He didn't even teach stats at school. He said that after I left, he had realized how much he had lost. He decided to stay the fuck away from the school and anyone associated with it."

"If I showed you a book, would you recognize the math? Could you identify his work?"

"No," Abby said. "The stuff he did was way over my head. It was way over a lot of people's heads. I doubt that unless you showed it to someone who studied applied Math, anyone would be able to follow it. Even some of Sadie's professors have trouble with Wally and Sadie's work. The two of them are brilliant. Seriously brilliant."

"And they aren't father and daughter. You're sure there's no possibility of it?"

"Sadie likes Math because Wally likes Math. She latched onto Wally when her father was dying. She's always been brilliant, but she applied it to Math because she wanted to keep Wally closer."

"That doesn't really answer my question."

"Sadie isn't Wally's daughter," Abby said. "It's impossible. As I said, I didn't see him after I moved to New York."

"Not even once?"

"He called a couple of times, but my girlfriend answered the phone for me. You have to understand; I was terrified and heartbroken. Until Waldo went to the league, they hadn't done anything to him. It was me they were terrorizing. It was me who had to go through the humiliation of listening to how lucky I was that all that happened was that I had a couple of bruises. Like eighteen hours tied to a bed, scared that I would get raped or shot before someone found me, wasn't torture? And it was like it didn't matter to him. We moved off campus, sure, but he didn't stop. He didn't even protest when the fucking muppets were on the field again at the very next game. He kept saying that if I let them see how scared I was, then they had won. Even after I moved to New York, I was terrified to walk into an empty apartment. I'd wait in a coffee shop until my roommate came home, so we could go in together. Anyway, when I saw him again years later when Sadie was little, I was in a much better place, and I remembered what a great guy he was, and he helped my family through a difficult time in our lives."

"He's taking the threats seriously this time," I said.

"Yeah," she said. "Wally adores Bernadette. He told me he barely survived losing me; if something happened to her because of this stupid cheating, he wouldn't be able to go on."

"Would he pass a message onto you through Sadie?"

"Not one she would understand," Abby said. "He wants to protect her the way he protects Bernadette. He wants to keep her innocent."

"Why did she go to Linton if you both had such bad experiences there?"

"Because she wanted to follow in our footsteps, and as I said, we kept the horrible stuff from her. We shouldn't have. We thought..." Abby's voice broke, "We thought because it started before she found his work, that it wouldn't be a big deal. We thought her research was unrelated."

I couldn't think of anything else I wanted to ask her, so I kept quiet, and then she picked up the picture again. "I know this is Wally. It has to be."

"If he turns himself in to Rangeman, we can keep him safe," I said. "We can stash him and Bernadette and your family someplace until it all gets sorted out. If you know of any way to contact him that he would check, you have to do it."

She nodded, took the photo and went to her bedroom. Ranger came to our bedroom door immediately after she shut her door and crooked his finger at me. I went into our room. He'd been listening and taking notes. "I need my computer," I said. "I need my stuff that's in Boston. I need my office."

He agreed. "We're going back tonight. Connie is going to stay here with Abby. As soon as she gets here, we're going to Trenton."

We got to Trenton in the wee hours of the morning, and while I was exhausted, I still needed to compile all of the information I had on this whole mess. If Abby was correct, had Connie and I messed up Dickerson's attempt to fake his own death or had he wanted us a part of it, and something had gone terribly wrong? Was he actually dead? If there were a mould of his body somewhere, could someone have made a Waldo Dickerson mask, and that's what Abby saw? If so, where had the guy gone when Molly went back for her forgotten whatever? I crashed somewhere around four in the morning and didn't wake up again until my phone rang in my ear. It was my sister.

"Steph! You have to stop him!"

"Stop who?" I asked, sitting up, wide awake.

"Dad! He's going to kill Joe because you had sex!"