Mortal Danger

reps and that the first session would net him at least five thousand dollars.
    He rented a small apartment in Coronado, assuring her that this would be a new start for them. But Kate no longer believed it.

Chapter Five
    The watershed point of a relationship comes at different times for different people. In the spring of 1999, Kate Jewell reached the point of no return. “I realized that I had to leave him if I hoped to keep some little shred of me alive.” She wondered if anyone would even believe that she was serious about leaving. She had promised to leave John so many times before.
    They were halfway separated now. The millennium was approaching, and the last few years of the twentieth century were creeping by. Kate would mark her fiftieth birthday in April. If she was ever going to retake possession of her own personality, the part that was truly her, it was time. She could support herself if she returned to flying full-time, and she could live with friends in San Francisco.
    Kate tried to follow John’s counselor’s directives. Charlie, John’s therapist, had advised her to keep John calm, to see that they had enough income to pay their basic expenses, and to quell the feeling of foreboding that sometimes caught her unawares. That sense of danger got worse after she saw a television movie about the Ira Einhorn case in Philadelphia. She saw too many close parallels betweenEinhorn and John. Einhorn had been so like the younger John—a charismatic and convincing counterculture activist at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. When Einhorn’s girlfriend, Holly Maddux, disappeared suddenly in 1977, her family and friends lived in dread; Holly hadn’t been able to get away from Ira, either. She had stayed, believing things would change for the better.
    Some months after Holly vanished, her mummified body was discovered in a steamer trunk in a roof closet connected to Einhorn’s apartment. He glibly denied knowing anything about her death, but he jumped bail and left the United States in 1981 just before he was to go on trial for first-degree murder. Einhorn was convicted of Holly Maddux’s death in absentia in 1993.
    (In 1993, no one knew where Einhorn was; only later, in 1997, would he be found living the good life with his Swedish wife in France. After much negotiation, he was extradited to America in 2001. Despite the pitiful finale of Holly’s life, he had become almost a fascinating antihero. Kate could visualize John skating just as free as Einhorn, using his charm to draw supporters to him.)
    One of Einhorn’s judges summed him up in a way that Kate Jewell recognized: “…He is an intellectual dilettante who preyed on the uninitiated, uninformed, unsuspecting, and inexperienced….”
    And that was Dr. John Branden, a man Kate now saw revealed as a hater of women, who thought he was so much smarter than the masses who believed his lies and his embroidery of the truth. She believed that she could be as easily sacrificed as Holly Maddux had been.
    On April 24, Kate wrote her will, and she wrote a letterto her landlords and friends Bill and Doris. “If you are reading this, I am gone,” it began. “I do not want to die, yet must write how I am feeling. I have had a sense of death for the past few days…. In six days, I will be 50. In 3 days, John will come. I hope I make it to my 50th birthday.
    “After all the violence I have experienced with John—physical, mental and emotional—I still hope and try to believe that somehow if I stay with him, we can bring something valuable to the world…. I believe [the work] can help the world accept responsibility and know how to respond to health concerns. Unfortunately, I also think it tends to drive someone to the point of insanity.”
    She was, of course, writing about John. She wrote of a nightmare John had had the night before, and of how upset he’d been when he’d called her to tell her about it. “…‘This man attacked me at my car and strangled me with piano wire.’ I believe this man is John, in his sub or unconscious. The loving side of him is warning me about the vicious, angry side of him. If that angry side comes out while he is here, I fear my death.”
    John was telling a number of their mutual friends how angry he was at Kate and how he blamed her for all of his troubles. “I guess slowly but surely the violence has destroyed my feelings for him,” she wrote. “I have desperately wanted to believe (and still do) that