Mortal Danger

about what she had told me, so he couldn’t let me live.”
    Somehow, Randall Nozawa did live, although whether he would remained questionable for weeks. As he slowly fought his way back through surgery and infections, he began to feel that he was meant to live—that he still had many things to do with his life.
    Even completely blind now, he realized he could find ways he could work with people to find their own way back to health.
    Sometimes he pondered on the irony of it. John, the health guru, had destroyed life and hope—but Randall himself felt he was meant to continue the work that John had only espoused in self-absorbed double-talk.
    Randall still teaches yoga, Pilates, and physical fitness.

Chapter Fifteen
    In essence, the homicide investigation was over, and Pierce County Detective Todd Karr told reporters that. There was a living witness to murder, and the prime suspect was dead by his own hand. There would, of course, be no trial.
    The investigators kept John Williams’s real identity secret for several days while they investigated possible charges against him in other states. Aside from the Curry County, Oregon, charges still extant in his attack on Kate, and his escape from deputies in Napa, California, they found none. The case was officially closed.
    But it wasn’t over for Kate. She was compelled to find out why John had left Florida hurriedly in 1986, and why he had been so hesitant to go back there. During their visit to the Mannatech executives who lived in Jupiter, Florida, John had been jumpy and irritable, and he hadn’t been able to head back to the West Coast quickly enough. During the past eight years, Kate would have been foolhardy to ask questions of John’s friends and associates, because he could have found her. Now, finally, she was able to search for answers.
    Many people who had known John in the past failed to return her calls. She wanted to know when and where John had first met Turi, but even Turi’s own family didn’t know for sure. The Gig Harbor and Pierce County police investigators were convinced that Turi had had no idea about John’s criminal background, had known very little about his life before she’d met him, and hadn’t even known his real name. Kate felt that Turi’s last trip with John, through Oregon, had apparently opened her eyes, and she’d wanted no part of him.
    John’s parents were dead, but in 2008, Kate read some letters that had been exchanged between John and the elder Brandens back in 1986. His mother begged him to tell them why he’d left, and she assured him that if they just knew the truth, they could help him. His father was ill with what seemed to be colitis—but it was in fact a metastasis of prostate cancer that would kill him within months.
    “Dear Jack,” his mother wrote, “we are very much upset, and things cannot continue like this much longer. The best thing for you to do is tell the truth and let us determine how serious these charges are against you. What you are doing is breaking up the whole family, and there is not much more we can take. All things must come to an end, and we could be reaching the breaking point.”
    John told his parents that he’d left because Florida health officials had been hounding him, trying to put him out of business—or perhaps even put him in jail—because they’d been trying to get rid of all those practicing alternative medicine. He said they’d been investigating some of the prescriptions he’d written. He assured them there was really nothing to the charges, and told them how much heloved them, and how happy he and Sue and the girls were in California.
    Kate soon found another possible reason why John had left so hurriedly; some of the people she talked to said John had behaved inappropriately with a young female client who might even have been impregnated by him.
    But Kate believed it had to be a lot more than either of those reasons. John referred to a “horrible” secret only when he was drunk, although he’d tiptoed around any details and shut up completely when she’d tried to ask questions. He told her that he’d made $30,000 in just one night and that the money was connected with his midnight escape from Florida. He never went further than that, though. How could he have made $30,000 in one night by impregnating a patient? Or by practicing naturopathy? No way. But there was Bill Thaw, whom John had idolized—Thaw, who was a con man’s con man, and maybe a lot more