Ranger slowly slid into his SUV and sat motionless behind the wheel. He'd been afraid that Lester would turn up on the sheet and had been foolishly confident if he did, the trace would be given to himself. Stephanie may figure out the connection but she'd never find Lester as long as Ranger kept him holed up in his Stark Street building but any other place; he'd be an easy catch. No doubt he'd be found at the nearest bar drinking himself into oblivion, which is what had gotten him to this point.
Ranger thought back to when he'd first met Lester. A fresh faced recruit who had ganged up to survive in his neighborhood on the wrong side of the track in the shadow of Fort Dix, where Ranger and his special ops troop was stationed, but slipped away when he joined up. He left his girl at home with a promise to come back and save her too. Ranger had met the girl a couple of times. Pretty and innocent looking with long, silky, dark hair. She couldn't have been more than 18.
He remembered the day Lester had gotten the news, his girl was missing. He'd begged leave to help with the search and they'd let him go. When her body was found, gutted like a trout, on the banks of the Delaware River, Lester was the first suspect. Even in the early days following her death, before his name was cleared, Lester was a changed man. The entire elite group of Army Rangers that served with Lester was at the funeral but Lester was nowhere to be found. He was chasing leads in vain. No one knew anything and if they did, they weren't going to tell Lester. Ranger tracked him down and, knowing how futile it would be to tell him to let the police do their job, helped him go door to door.
When he returned to camp, Lester was angry. Ranger knew that if someone took someone he loved, he would be too. His fellow soldiers understood the anger and mostly left Lester alone. Ranger had come to regard Lester's solitude as a mistake. Once his investigation started tapering off, he'd turned to drink. Ranger couldn't count the number of times he'd rushed Lester out of a bar brawl to save him the discharge he so richly deserved. He didn't plan to give up on the young, wide-eyed, recruit.
With time and help from Ranger and the Fort psychologist, Lester seemed to come to terms with the death. The psychologist had said to Ranger that Lester would ever get over, he'd simply learn to live with it and he had. He finished his hitch to distinction and when they'd all decided not to re-enlist, he'd happily agreed to join on to the security business that his commanding officer planned to form.
Ranger leaned back against the seat rest and rubbed his eyes. How quickly things change. Cold case detectives in Trenton had found someone who would talk and finally there was a suspect in the case. Trace evidence left on the body had yielded a DNA profile and that profile had quickly been matched to a repeat offender.
When the case was reopened, Lester started to drink again. Ranger had tried everything to stop him and it seemed his friend was descending deeper into the comfort he found at the bottom of a bottle.
Lester sat in the crowd as his girlfriend's killer was indicted and watched as he walked from the courthouse as free man. By all accounts, Lester had been too drunk that night to do anything but when the not yet convicted killer was found dead, the police honed in on the man they knew to have a cause – Lester.
Ranger didn't know if Lester had or hadn't, in a drunken rage, killed the man. He knew the alleged killer and couldn't understand how a drunken man could overpower him but emotion is a mysterious thing. What Ranger did know if that he wouldn't blame Lester for taking the law into his own hands if he had. Ranger considered how he'd feel if it was one of his family members on the bank of that river but quickly shook that thought away as Stephanie appeared before him with her wide eyes and dark, curly, hair. Ranger steeled himself and switched the SUV on. The only thing to do was to investigate this himself. He'd find out if Lester had killed the man or if he hadn't and only then would he turn Lester over to anyone, proof for or against in hand.
The first thing he needed to do was to have a talk with Stephanie Plum and to ignore the guilty thrill that rushed through his body whenever she was around.