What I didn't know until the flight landed at Saint Anthony Hospital was that it wasn't just a single helicopter flying into the coordinates that Mick sent for his retrieval with Johnny. It was damned near a fleet of them, courtesy of the FBI tapping into resources via the National Guard.
Johnny landed at the hospital before Gary Gates had lab results back from the blood a little vampire in forest green scrubs had drawn almost the instant that the orders left the emergency department doctor's mouth. There wasn't any of the nonsense from the previous night, where Johnny and I were forced to wait outside while David's fate had hung in the balance.
The doctor was the same one who had given me the news that devastated me the night before.
"Doctor," he said with a curt nod.
I responded in kind.
"Is the man you were trying to rescue when your friend was killed last night?"
"Yes," I said. "How is he?"
"From report and what I've observed, it seems that he's been kept sedated with some sort of opiate. I won't know which one without some extensive testing. The flight crew said it was delivered like oxygen."
"Yes."
"I'd suspect a form fentanyl. It can be—"
"Methylfenanyl?" I interrupted somewhat harshly.
"You're familiar with it?"
"It was used in a terrorist attack in Moscow in 2002," I said. "You'll need that H-tank so you can determine the potency. It can be 400 to 6000 times as potent as morphine. It's a wonder she didn't kill him!"
"I suspect it's the lower end of potency, which is still no small concern. He seems to be responding well to fluids and the Narcan."
Narcan is a drug that binds opiate receptors and effectively cuts off the ability of the drug to continue to have any impact on the body. The fact that Gates was starting to wake up should've been enough to alleviate my concerns. Yet I couldn't help but recall how just a small whiff of the gas had affected me, and told the doctor about my experience.
"Do you feel all right now?" he snapped his fingers. "Mavis, get Dr. Eriksson a chair. Let's get a set of vitals, a drug panel and comp on her right away."
"I'm fine," I assured him.
"Let's not be under-cautious here. God only knows what she actually had in that oxygen canister, doctor. I'd rather proceed with more than a modicum of caution."
And that was how Johnny found me. Sitting in a chair in the emergency department with a blood pressure cuff on one arm and that same vampire sucking blood out of my right arm.
His eyes widened. "What happened?"
"It's just a precaution, Commander Orion," the doctor said.
I nodded while the thermometer under my tongue started beeping.
"Her vitals are within normal limits, doctor, except for her heart rate. It's fifty-two."
"Fitness fanatic?" he asked.
Johnny chuckled. "You could say that."
"Hold her until the labs get back, and then she can move to Mr. Gates' bedside and talk to him."
I insisted that Johnny stay with Gary Gates. Good thing too. It took an hour for the doctor to return and tell me that my blood work was completely normal except that I could stand to rehydrate a bit. He asked if I wanted IV fluids, but I declined and promised to drink as many bottles of water as the nurse could find for me.
Gates was still pretty out of it when I joined Johnny at his bedside. Every time his eyelids fluttered open, he said the same name: Katrina.
When he finally seemed lucid for a little longer than three seconds, I asked him if he knew what happened to Katrina.
His eyes filled with tears. I'd never seen that much anguish on a man's face in my life. They're supposed to be too strong, too macho to show that kind of emotion. In over three years, I'd only seen Johnny cry once. Well, twice if I counted the day the boys were born, but those weren't all-out-tears. He just got a little dewy-eyed.
"She's gone," he wept. The volume was soft, but grew in a rapid crescendo. "Why didn't she just kill me too? Why? Oh my babies! Why, God, why?"
I gripped his hand. "Gary, you're in Lakewood Colorado. Do you know how you got here?"
He shook his head. "She…she did something to us. We had her over for…" sobs broke his speech again.
"For dinner?" I asked.
"No," he whispered, and then tried to clear his throat. It was a pitiful gasping, coughing sound. "Becca. Becca wanted a tea party. She liked Harry. Harry would play with the girls when she'd drop by the house with stuff for the office."
"Becca was your four year old, right?" I asked.
Gates nodded. "She wanted to have a tea party with real tea. Harry used to bring it with her when she'd come over."
My heart sank. How easy it had been for this monster to insinuate herself with a family, and then drug them before she smothered the women and stole the father.
"Gary, do you have any idea why she did this? Did she let you wake up long enough to tell you what was going through her head?" I asked.
"I…there are only fragments. She kept me on some kind of drug. I was breathing it in on the flight. She took it off for a little while because the flight attendant was worried about how little I was breathing. I remember hearing them argue a little bit, and Harry told her that it was my oxygen, that without it, I wouldn't be able to breathe at all."
"Shit," Johnny muttered.
"After you got to Colorado, did she tell you why she brought you here?"
"It didn't make any sense," Gary said softly.
"Tell me. It may not make sense to you, but it could help us catch her. Anything you remember at all could be vitally important."
"She just…she kept calling me Daddy, and telling me that everything would be okay when it was just the two of us again. You've got to catch her, please. I'll never be okay, but you can't let her do this to anyone else!"
"You have my word, Gary. I'll do anything it takes and then some to bring this woman to justice."
I pulled away from the bed and walked out into the corridor with Johnny on my heels. "Who can come from Darkwater Bay to take him back to his family?" I asked.
"Uh…any of the guys at this point. I'd say the investigation there is over. We're not going to learn much about Harriet Fletcher out there, not when this was the place where she brought our survivor. She'd be too smart to leave anything behind in Darkwater Bay anyhow."
"Get someone out here to take him home to his family, and I want all of them, his parents, brothers, sisters as well as his wife's family in protective custody until Fletcher's caught," I said. "I don't think she'd go after them again, but based on what he told us in there, it's a gamble I'm not willing to take."
"What're you doing?" he asked.
"I want to check in with Rhodes and tell him that we found Gary Gates, that he's going to make a full recovery. And after you get the transfer for Gates arranged, you need to talk to Crevan and find out what he and Dad have learned about Harriet Fletcher."
I started to walk away. Johnny snagged me with a loose grasp on my fingers. "Where you goin', Helen?"
"Back to the hotel. I'm beat."
"We brought back that oxygen tank. The FBI is going to rush processing through the Colorado Bureau of Investigation's lab so we'll know what she's using to drug the men she's abducted."
"Were they searching the cabin yet before you left?"
Johnny ducked his head. "We probably shouldn't discuss much of this here, honey."
"Come back to the hotel with me. We'll make our calls, have a hot bath and order room service and go over everything that happened today."
Johnny's smile didn't quite reach his eyes. "Are you sure you're all right? I'm worried, honey. Because of yesterday and David, and the way you've just thrown yourself into this investigation now without any reservations at all. If you tell me you're okay, I'll believe you, but—"
"I can't stop to process what happened to David yet. Not if you expect me to keep my head in the case and catch Fletcher. Which reminds me. We need to release her photo to the press and every law enforcement agency in the country. I want her picture in every household in America on the late news and the morning shows and anywhere else we can put it. The more people see her and know how dangerous she is, the harder it'll be for her to evade capture."
We walked briskly back to the hotel. I was dealing with my own thoughts while Johnny talked to the Park County sheriff about releasing the basic information and a photograph of Harriet Sue Fletcher to every media outlet we could.
"I'll talk to her about it. I'm not sure what she'll say, sheriff, but I don't think it's a bad idea. If you can get something like that arranged quickly and she agrees to do it, I'm sure she'd have no problem being up at six in the morning to make a statement."
I groaned. "Me? I gotta make the statement to the news media? Man…"
Johnny just squeezed my hand and kept walking.
Rhodes answered his phone on the first ring. "Helen, I was just getting ready to call you. We've been on the trail of the Banks family all day. The church is weird, but it checked out. I talked to the pastor who helped with Fester thirty years ago. Apparently, he was simply dropped on the doorstep of the church."
"And they never called social services?"
Jeremy sighed. "No. Apparently, any form of government sponsored social programs are akin to the slide into communism to these folks. They are strictly conservative. Now, I don't have anything against conservatives. I think being fiscally conservative is a good thing. But without social programs to help those truly in need, we'd be slipping close to the third world in my opinion."
"So did the pastor have any information about him at all?"
"Nope. He said the boy didn't even know his own name, that it was obvious that he'd been abused. Apparently he had burn marks on his feet. The reverend said they suspected someone had made him walk on hot coals or something. It was pretty dramatic, but completely healed. Fester didn't tell them anything. In fact, he wouldn't even talk for two weeks. He was malnourished, terrified, like I said, scarred. They were afraid that the system had done that to him, and that he'd likely run away from a foster home. They weren't about to take him back."
"But how did they get a birth certificate for him?" I asked. "Not just a birth certificate, but one that showed the boy was legally adopted?"
"I guess one of the parishioners was a lawyer, knew people who knew people, and they managed to…hang on, I want to read the quote. We managed to follow man's law while still staying true to God's law and the charity commanded by Christ."
"Honestly, I have no problem with that, Jeremy," I said. "Maybe if churches provided more charitable service, we wouldn't need so much from our tax funded variety, eh."
"Except there was a price to pay for the church's charity. That was strict adherence to not just God's law—the Old Testament variety—but the church's interpretation of it. Let's not forget that the Banks family essentially tossed Felix to the wolves when he was twenty because he impregnated his girlfriend."
"Did you believe his story about how Fester came to be in their congregation?" I asked. "I mean, dumping a baby is one thing, even back in the 80's, but dumping a nine year old kid sounds off kilter even in this day and age."
"I believed him," Jeremy said. "He told me that there was one other distinguishing feature that Fester had when he arrived. I told you about the burns to his feet and toes."
"Yeah."
"He had a brand on his left buttock. They thought it might be a clue to his identity, but they never were able to figure out what it meant."
"What was it?" I asked.
"The reverend said it looked like a bow."
"As in bow and arrows bow?" I froze in my tracks where I'd been pacing the length of our hotel suite.
"No, like a bow you tie in a girl's hair. Some type of swirly little brand on his butt."
"Did you find that odd, particularly in the context of what we're actually investigating?" I asked.
"I did, but figured that back in the eighties, Harriet Sue Fletcher wouldn't have been more than a kid herself."
"Right," I muttered.
Something didn't sit right about that detail with me. Were we looking for the wrong suspect? Had Banks somehow disguised himself as a woman and appeared convincingly androgynous, or were we looking at something else?