Mortal Danger

situation was bleak at best. Kate insisted that she had to keep flying. Although John detested the thought, he knew it was necessary.
    “And I was helping John as I always had by typing up his newest plan for success, and discussing just how we could sell it. But we’d be almost finished with his ‘Idea Number 22’ and ready to launch it when John lost interest and he was off to ‘Idea Number 26.’”
    John saw occasional nutrition “patients,” and he had blood studies done by Bonnie Crichton,* a young woman nutritionist who lived in Napa, in northern California, with her husband, Joe,* and their children. John had few friends,but he became close to the Crichtons. As part of his “Doctors’ Practice Builder Plan,” he taught Bonnie how to read blood chemistry, assuring her it would enhance her practice and her income.
    By now, Kate had created a standard written report for blood test results. It provided a comprehensive review for each patient. John suggested to Bonnie that she send him and Kate her patients’ blood test results. Kate would insert the information and send it back to Bonnie so she could share it with her patients.
    John promised Kate he would present her with $250,000, and she would see that she’d done the right thing by staying with him. She didn’t want the money, and she recognized his ebullient offer as a symptom of the manic side of his personality. Still, she hoped against hope that it wasn’t too late for them.
    It was.
    The aberrations in John’s thinking began to seep through his façade like poison. He couldn’t maintain the “new John.” The “heroic figures he admired were disturbing,” Kate said, shaking her head. “He thought Ted Kaczynski was a hero—and he thought the two kids [who] shot up Columbine were brave. He might only have been baiting me, but he seemed serious.”
    January wasn’t over when John had another tantrum, this one the worst Kate had experienced. Kate had met Paula Krogdahl at a swimming pool, and they shared rides. Paula was an assistant district attorney in Curry County. (This, by coincidence, was the same Paula Krogdahl I wrote about in Small Sacrifices . Fifteen years before shemet Kate, she’d helped Diane Downs’s daughter, Christie, recover from being shot by her mother, and counseled the girl on how to feel safe when she testified.)
    In the intervening years, Paula had become an expert in domestic violence. She had an uncanny knack for spotting abusive men, and John Branden frightened her. She was discreet, and asked Kate very tentatively if she was in trouble. Kate shook her head. She wasn’t ready to discuss her relationship yet.
    Paula recommended a beauty shop in Gold Beach run by a husband and wife. Kate had such thick hair that she’d had trouble finding a place to style it. On January 20, she had an appointment to have a shampoo, cut, and set. John insisted on going along, but he agreed to wait in the car for her. As it happened, the male owner had the first opening, and he started to wash Kate’s hair. For once, it didn’t hurt to have the snarls combed out, and she relaxed.
    It didn’t occur to her that John was watching every move through the window, and when she came out, he was very quiet.
    “I made the mistake of saying that the guy had given me the best shampoo I’d ever had, and I should never have mentioned that I’d enjoyed it.
    “The shampoo and cut took a long time, and John was fuming. He told me the salon owner was ‘coming on’ to me,” Kate recalled. “He said washing hair was a ‘sensual act.’”
    “I’ll never let you go back there again,” John snarled.
    At first, Kate resisted, saying he was imagining things, but John was adamant.
    They went next to a Fred Meyer store to get some shopping done, but John wouldn’t let it go, and he houndedKate to tears in the aisles, berating her for being seductive in the beauty shop. The afternoon was ruined, but it was more than that; their relationship was ruined. She had been waiting, albeit subconsciously, for the other shoe to drop, and now she realized that John had just been hiding the same old suspicions. That effort seemed to have made his rage more vicious.
    Kate had reached the point where she could never go back to a time when she had loved John.
    When they were back at the cottage, she blurted out that she was leaving him. Once again, he pulled out a gun. He threatened to shoot her cat, Mittens, and then her. She looked into his eyes and