Mortal Danger

consciousness.
    And then Kate finishes her entry in her journal. “ John is dead. My mind tells me that, and somehow, I know that he is!”
    The dream was so powerful that Kate caught herself obsessing over it all weekend, vacillating between knowing it was true, dismissing it as crazy, believing in her intuition, and questioning her own sanity. She walked on the beach, but she didn’t read newspapers or watch television news broadcasts. Even if she had, she wouldn’t have realized the couple who’d died in Gig Harbor had anything to do with her. Over the weekend, their identities were listed only as “a married couple in their sixties.”
     
    On Monday, April 2, Kate’s phone rang. She recognized the man’s voice, although she hadn’t talked to him for months. It was Detective Dave Gardiner of the Curry County Sheriff’s Office in Oregon.
    “Are you sitting down?” Gardiner asked.
    “John’s dead, isn’t he?” Kate already knew.
    Dave Gardiner was stunned, and he asked her who had told her.
    “Nobody told me, Dave,” Kate said. “I don’t know how I know, but I do.”
    A torrent of emotions washed over Kate Jewell. She was free at last, but she felt horrible guilt because she hadn’t been able to save a woman named Turi Bentley, a name Gardiner had just told her. Now, when it was too late, she knew the name of the woman who had come after her in John’s life. If she had died on that May night in 1999,John probably would have been caught and locked up, and Turi Bentley would be alive. Or maybe both of them would have been killed.
    John was gone, but she thought about how sad it was that he couldn’t have been the man she’d once admired. They had had the knowledge and opportunity to change so many lives for the good, and he had thrown it all away. He’d often told her that she had “ruined” many things for him, but it was he who had ruined them. His overweening focus on himself had destroyed hopes and dreams that other people had.
    Kate had felt somewhat safer as eight years had passed, and it was shocking to hear that John had been so close, living in Gig Harbor. My God! She had considered moving there when she’d fled from Oregon. All this time, she had pictured John in California or Florida, or even in some other country.
    And Kate was angry—perhaps irrationally angry—with John for dying before she knew what secrets he’d kept from her about his life in Florida. She had always thought that some day she would really know the man behind all the mystery, and that that would help her deal with the decade she’d spend living with him, and the eight years she’d lost hiding from him.
    Now, she wasn’t likely ever to know.
    Local papers in Washington State and the wire services carried the story of “The Mysterious Mr. Williams.” Reporters found Kate, and she agreed to give a few interviews, but her face on the television screen looked like a deer caught in the headlights. She was in shock, knowing her own story with John far too well but unsure aboutwhere he had been or what he had done since she’d last seen him. No, she didn’t know Turi Lee Bentley. No, she couldn’t say what his state of mind was in March 2007.
    But she wanted to know, Kate admitted to herself.
    When she talked with Pierce County Homicide Detective Todd Karr, Kate asked to see pictures of John—dead. She dreaded seeing them, but she still had an unreasoning fear that the body they had found on Lost Beach Road wasn’t really John. Not John—who had always been so clever about escaping when his life got too uncomfortable for him. He had studied at the side of one of the greatest con men of all: Bill Thaw. John had once told Kate that nobody ever saw Bill Thaw’s body after he committed suicide in Florida in 1987. There were no records of his burial or cremation. His body had disappeared. John had hinted that Thaw could be living in South America. Maybe John had managed to pull off the same feat, finding someone to stand in for him, to die for him. Maybe John was also on his way to South America.
    Detective Todd Karr advised Kate not to view crime scene or autopsy photos; John had suffered a single head wound, and the stark police photos would be shocking to a layperson, especially someone who had known the deceased in life. He assured her that fingerprints verified that the dead man was, indeed, John Branden-Williams.
    Dave Gardiner had seen John’s postmortem photos, too. “It was him, all right,” he