Mortal Danger

bring myself to turn him in. Besides, I had no way of knowing where he was—other than [that] he was underground.”
    The FBI agents didn’t question him again. Stan was suffering from an autoimmune disease that would eventually prove terminal, and he’d had to retire from his dental practice at a relatively young age. He told Kate that Detective Dave Gardiner from Curry County called him and questioned him about John’s whereabouts shortly after Kate was attacked, but he had no idea where John might have been in 1999. Now it was nine years later, and, except for that one visit, he’d never known where John Branden had been.
    Kate drew in a breath, wondering if she should ask Stan about what had happened more than two decades earlier to scare John enough to flee from Naples, Florida, in the middle of the night.
    “He was ‘training’ with Bill Thaw back then.”
    “What do you mean ‘training’?”
    Szabo didn’t answer her question directly. At one point,he said, Bill Thaw, a chiropractor named Kirk Radovich,* and Szabo were working at the Cedars of Lebanon Hospital in Miami–Dade County, in various capacities. Thaw was working as a counselor or a therapist, although where—or if—he’d gotten his training for that no one knew. “He was one in a million,” Stan Szabo said. “A devil and an angel. He could be humane, considerate, and helpful one minute, and then just the opposite, and could kill you for no reason. He was a classic, brilliant psychopath.”
    The retired dentist liked Thaw at times, but he was cautious around him because of his severe mood swings. “I had the most fun with Bill Thaw when he was ‘on.’ But he could turn on a dime, and he was a raging alcoholic.”
    This, Kate realized, was the man that John Branden had idolized, the man he had modeled himself after. It sounded as though John had been a “gofer” for Thaw, fascinated by Thaw’s exciting life and charisma and seeking to escape from a humdrum life as a property assessor.
    “Thaw had business ideas. When he broke away from Werner Erhard, he began the psi experience with me. We needed an investor with more money than we had, and I introduced Thaw to a man named Allen, who’d made his money in real estate. He was a millionaire. Our proposal was that we would have a presentation with Thaw doing the psi experience, and I would lecture on the nutrition part. Allen would supply the money until we got going. But at the last moment, Allen backed out. Instead, he introduced us to a banker friend of his. The bank loaned us thirty-five thousand dollars with Allen as the cosigner.”
    Stan said that he and Bill Thaw went to Miami to launchtheir psi experience in style, and they did well for about a year. That was when Dr. Kirk Radovich entered the picture. He attended a psi training session and was impressed.
    “Kirk invited Thaw and me to interact with his patients and do individual training in his office.”
    Kate waited patiently, hesitant to interrupt Szabo. So far, John didn’t seem to be in the picture at all.
    “What did John do?” she finally asked.
    “We didn’t know him yet,” Stan said. “I met him when he came to one of my lectures. And he met Bill Thaw, too.”
    Once Szabo and Thaw hooked up with Dr. Radovich, they formed a new corporation, with the three of them cutting Allen out. The whole country was intrigued with things like est, psi, love beads, incense, and new “far-out” experiences, and Florida was the ideal place to be with the dynamic Thaw, Radovich’s established practice, and Stan’s well-grounded training and experience in doing hair and blood analysis. He was a dentist, but he had also studied in the field of blood analysis.
    “Kirk didn’t really understand the analysis I did,” Stan told Kate. “If a patient asked a question about it, he would run down the hall and get an answer from me—but I was never allowed to actually see the patients. I got tired of that arrangement and went off and did my own lectures.”
    Bill Thaw was apparently helping patients with their psychological problems, which was a bleak joke—a sociopath acting as a counselor. “I’ve believed for a long time that we create our own reality,” Szabo told Kate. “Once, Isaid to Bill, ‘When you participate in a hurtful action against someone, you enjoy it.’ Bill just laughed, and I knew he acknowledged that.”
    Stan explained that there was a balloon payment due on the $35,000 loan. He asked Bill what