Mortal Danger

than that. He either committed suicide or disappeared a year after John ran away from Florida. Maybe Thaw had been keeping horrible secrets, too.
    When Kate wrote to Dwight and Susan Havener a year after John’s death, she received only a short response. She hadn’t told them that John was dead, but Dwight wrote back to say that they’d heard only “bits and pieces” about John and didn’t care to know more, whatever he was doing in 2008. Kate couldn’t blame him; John had never paid the Haveners the $1,500 he’d owed them, and he hadn’t turned out to be the kind of “associate” they’d hoped for.
    Actually, many of his former Mannatech associates may not have known that John is dead and will learn about it for the first time in this book.
    Kate wondered where John had been between the middle of June 1999, when he’d escaped from deputies in Napa, California, and 2001 or 2002, when he’d resurfaced in Gig Harbor and Tacoma, Washington. Maybe he’d been in Bill Nichols’s Mount Shasta home or in a monastery all that time? Hardly likely. He certainly managed to land on his feet, especially after he met Turi Bentley.
    Kate still hadn’t found out anything about his last days in Florida. She couldn’t locate his older sister, whom John had accused of “turning him in.” Turning him in for what?
    After many false leads, Kate managed to find a phone number for Dr. Stanley Szabo, who had once been John’s closest friend and, because of that, her apartment mate in Solana Beach. Stan had always been grateful to John for helping him out back in the late eighties; in return, according to Randall Nozawa, John had spoken of the now-retired dentist as someone he admired more than any other man. (He had long since stopped extolling the brilliance of Bill Thaw by the time he met Randall.)
    After following numerous paths that led to slammed doors or no information, Kate found what she was looking for when she talked to Stan. After some hesitancy, he revealed that John had shown up at his house in Del Ray Beach, Florida, one day, walking in as if he’d only been away for an hour or so, when Szabo hadn’t heard from him in at least two years.
    “When was that?” Kate asked.
    “Probably early 2001,” Szabo guessed.
    Dr. Szabo accompanied John to his hotel room, and they talked for six hours. John said he was “underground,” after an unfortunate incident with Kate.
    “I almost killed her,” John said. “We’d been arguing all day, and I packed a ‘getaway bag’ just in case I had to leave in a hurry.”
    According to this latest version, John said he was holding a gun to Kate’s head, and she managed to grab the phone and call 911. “I had the gun to her head and was ready to kill her when I heard the sheriff driving down to our house. I just grabbed my bag and ran.”
    He had rewritten the whole scenario. Maybe John really didn’t remember the way he’d beaten and raped Kate; more likely, he had made himself sound tougher and portrayed Kate as a shrew, nagging and arguing with him all day until he could no longer control himself.
    To Szabo’s amazement, John asked him to leave behind his new family—which included his second wife and two teenagers—and go underground with him. John boasted that he had come upon a wonderful plan for a business that they could operate behind the scenes. The money would be amazing.
    “I’ll do all the legwork,” he promised, “and you’ll be the front man.”
    This was basically the same organizational plan that John would offer Randall Nozawa a few years later. John was disappointed when Stan Szabo refused his offer to leave his family and live on the edge of society with John Branden.
    Kate asked Stan if John had spoken of a new woman in his life in 2001, but Stan couldn’t recall John mentioning any female other than Kate. Maybe John hadn’t met Turi yet. Although Stan Szabo couldn’t recall the exact date thatJohn had shown up at his house, Kate got the impression that it was before September 11.
    Szabo had no idea where John went after their long conversation in John’s hotel room, and he never heard from him again. However, FBI special agents knocked on his door, asking about John. Stan didn’t know if they knew John had been in Del Ray Beach, or if it was only a coincidence.
    “I just promised John that I loved him like a brother,” Stan Szabo told Kate. “And I did, too. I didn’t think he ever really would have hurt you, and I couldn’t