Silent Witness (5 page)

Chapter Eight

I left the medical examiner's office and made a mad dash for Park City. I figured that if I drove like Michael Andretti at the Indianapolis 500, I might make Sara's four-thirty soccer game. This was her second year playing soccer, and she was turning into a first rate little goalie. If I miss one of her games, my most favored Dad rating takes a nose dive, not only on Sara's scale, but on Aunt June's as well. That's real pressure. Sometimes circumstances make it impossible for me to attend a game, but I've managed to make most of them.

On my way up the mountain, I tried to call Kate on her cell. This was high speed multi-tasking at its very best, and I'm happy to report that I didn't kill anyone in the process. Kate didn't answer so I left a message promising to call her first thing in the morning. I also found a message on my cell from Patti telling me to contact Captain Jerry Branch, day shift commander of the Uintah I prison housing unit. Perhaps my interview with Walter Bradshaw resulted in a flurry of communication with his contacts on the outside. I would soon find out.

The game was being played at the middle school near Kimball Junction. I made it just as the game began. I took over from Aunt June who had driven Sara and two of her teammates to the game. Sara managed fourteen saves but her team lost two to one. In order to lift team spirits, yours truly sprang for Pizza Hut pizza for what seemed like half the team.

When we got home, I observed an unmarked Summit County Sheriff's Department car parked across the street from my house. Because of the nature of my work, I pay particular attention to unfamiliar vehicles parked anywhere near my home. I sent Sara on into the house. An older, plain-clothes suit got out of the sheriff's vehicle and walked toward me carrying what looked like a legal file. I didn't recognize him.

“Excuse me,” he said. “Would you be Sam Kincaid?”

“I am. And you are?”

“Jerry Grover.” He reached out and shook my hand. “I'm a retired deputy with the sheriff's department. I still work part-time serving legal process.”

I was puzzled. “And what brings you to see me, Jerry?”

He broke eye contact and looked slightly embarrassed. “I'm sorry, but I have the unpleasant task of having to serve you with court papers.”

I had a sinking feeling. “What kind of court papers?”

“Family court documents—appears to be a child custody law suit.” I accepted service of the documents and Grover departed. I should have seen this coming.

My former spouse, Nicole Bingham-Kincaid, had gone ballistic when she heard about the violent incident that occurred in our home several months earlier. In the confusion of the moment, it never occurred to me that I'd better call her in Atlanta and explain what happened before somebody else did. Well, somebody else did, and Nicole was furious that she got the news from someone else, and furious that my work had placed our daughter in imminent danger.

She arrived in Salt Lake City the next morning on the first available flight from Atlanta. Because Nicole is an Atlanta-based flight attendant for Delta Airlines, she was able to arrange her schedule over the next several weeks so that she was routed through Salt Lake City. This allowed her to spend more time with Sara. During the ensuing summer months, Sara spent several weeks in Atlanta with Nicole. When Nicole had to fly, Sara stayed with her grandparents who reside about thirty minutes outside Atlanta.

Standing in my driveway, I quickly perused the legal paperwork. The documents notified me of Nicole's intent to seek primary custody of Sara and move her to Atlanta. A hearing had been scheduled in three weeks. Nicole had made noises to me about this during the summer, but I had chosen to ignore her, believing that things would calm down and it would all blow over. Not so.

I felt sick to my stomach. What would I say to Aunt June and Sara? Should I even tell Sara at this point? Since the divorce, with a lot of help from Aunt June, we had managed to become a loving, cohesive family. Surely, no family court judge would choose to turn Sara's and our lives upside down.

And what was Nicole thinking? Her life, the life that she had chosen ahead of marriage and family, was a life flying to destinations all over the globe. She could only make this arrangement work with the help of her parents or a live-in nanny. I slipped the documents into my briefcase and went in the house.

Aunt June was waiting for me in the kitchen wearing a concerned look on her face. “Who was that man and what did he want?”

“We need to talk. Where's Sara?”

“Downstairs playing computer games. What's this all about? He came to the door looking for you. When I told him that you weren't home from work, he thanked me and then just sat in his car. He's been out there for almost an hour.”

I showed her the paperwork and explained what I thought it meant. In my entire life, Aunt June had always been calm and stoic in the face of difficulty. I had seen tears only once, and that was at the funeral of my parents, both killed in a light plane crash while vacationing. On this occasion, I could see tears welling in the corners of both eyes. She dabbed them with a tissue. What came next surprised me. The emotion had quickly given way to something between anger and outright defiance.

“We're going to fight this, aren't we?” she asked. “We'll hire the best damn attorney money can buy. And we'll fight her. What in heavens name could Nicole be thinking—to tear this little girl from a loving and stable environment and move her clear across the country?” A fair question I thought.

“Yes, I suspect we will,” I said. “But we've got to think it through very carefully. This would be a poor time for a knee-jerk response. In the meantime, we say nothing to Sara. There'll probably come a time when we will have to tell her, but not now.” I knew myself well enough to understand that I'm not particularly good at figuring things out on the fly—thinking quickly on my feet had never been my forte. Given a little time, things would come into focus, and I would know what to do.

Sleep did not come easy. I read, tossed and turned, read some more, and tossed and turned some more. I did what I often do in situations like this. I got up and went to work. I tip-toed down the hall, looked in on Sara, and then slipped into my office.

I began by reviewing the SIB's intelligence file on the Reformed Church of the Divine Christ. Intelligence information, sketchy as it was, had determined that the church was established sometime in late 2002 after Bradshaw and several members of his family had been evicted from the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (FLDS) compound on the Arizona-Utah border.

Scuttlebutt was that the church intended to purchase land in the desert red rock country of southern Utah large enough to support a growing band of polygamist church members, and remain independent from other Mormon fundamentalist groups. That plan, of course, required money, and the brethren seemed to have little compunction about stealing and robbing to get it.

In the beginning, burglary and theft seemed to be their crimes of choice. There was a long string of unsolved property crimes committed against FLDS property all along the Utah-Arizona border. More recently, Bradshaw and his followers escalated their lawbreaking behavior to include armed robberies.

Since his arrest and return to the Utah State Prison, Walter had received no fewer than two visits from detectives from the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police and the Denver Police Department. In both instances, he was questioned about unsolved armored car robberies occurring in Vegas and Denver where the perps followed the same MO as the Salt Lake City heist. So far, no charges had been filed in either case because of insufficient evidence.

As far I could tell, the church's core membership consisted of patriarch Walter, his two sons, Albert and Joseph, their wives and children, a nephew of Walter, and two cousins. The nephew had been killed in the armored car robbery. The cousins, Randy and Robert Allred, both had extensive criminal records. Like Walter, Randy Allred was a parole violator wanted by authorities in Arizona.

The Allred brothers and both of Walter's sons were wanted for murder and aggravated robbery in the armored car mess. And it certainly wasn't a big stretch to believe that the gang might be involved in Ginsberg's murder as well as the disappearance of the other witness, Robin Joiner.

I spent the better part of the next hour listening to my tape recorded interview with Walter Bradshaw hoping that I missed some small but important detail or subtlety in our conversation. When I reached the part where Bradshaw talked about Ginsberg and Joiner, something he said stopped me cold. I rewound the tape and played it again, and then once more. Maybe I'd found something. It was a small thing and it would take some digging.

Eventually sheer exhaustion overtook my ability to listen or think. I spent the next two hours dozing on an old leather couch in the corner of my office until the first rays of sunshine touched the wood blinds and woke me.

Chapter Nine

I found my way into the kitchen intent on fixing a pot of coffee, then banana waffles for Sara and me. Raisin Bran with berries or a banana was Aunt June's daily fare, and, unless we were all going out for breakfast, she seldom varied it.

I decided not to say anything to Sara about the child custody issue until I had more information. That meant finding an attorney to represent us in Atlanta, no small feat in itself, and talking to my ex, Nicole. At the moment, I was angry at Nicole and wasn't sure whether I could have a civil conversation with her. I guess I felt that she should have given me a heads-up about what she planned to do. But maybe she had, and I'd just missed the signals.

Anger aside, I had to admit that Nicole was only doing what she believed was in Sara's best interest. Yet I couldn't reconcile how Nicole had arrived at the conclusion that moving Sara across the country, away from all her friends and everything familiar to her, was preferable to a stable home with a full-time dad and the loving presence of Aunt June. It just didn't make sense. Unless Nicole planned to hire a live-in nanny, Sara would have to be shuffled to the home of her grandparents every time Nicole flew. And because of her seniority with the airline and her desire to visit far off places, Nicole frequently traveled abroad.

After breakfast and a quick review of the words on her spelling test scheduled for later in the day, I dropped Sara at school and headed to my office at the state prison.

***

I made it into the office before Terry Burnham arrived. I had devised a get-even scheme for the assortment of auto air fresheners Burnham had planted in my office prior to Ginsberg's autopsy. He was late, and this gave me the perfect opportunity to implement my plan.

I grabbed the master key that would unlock his desk and a bottle of glue. At the risk of ending up charged with the destruction of state property, I resisted the temptation to use Super Glue and stuck to the ordinary kind. With the deft touch of Van Gogh, who was only slightly crazier than I am, I slapped a coat of the stuff along the lip of the middle drawer of Burnham's desk. I did the same to each of his side drawers.

Patti, my secretary, and Marcy Everest, one of my investigators, hardly glanced in my direction as they hovered over the office coffee maker like a pair of addicts waiting in line at the local crack house. Finally, Marcy looked over and said, “What the hell kind of mischief are you up to now?”

I smiled. “Wait and see.”

When I finished, I relocked his desk and hustled back to my office to await his arrival and the show that would surely follow.

A few minutes later, Burnham rolled in looking haggard and thoroughly hung over. He avoided eye contact with everyone and barely grumbled a hello at Marcy who had spoken to him. Keys in hand, he plopped down at his desk, and unlocked it. He gave the middle drawer a tug—nothing happened. He pulled again, still nothing.

In a half whisper, he muttered, “What the fuck?” Then he gave the drawer a major pull and still nothing happened. The laughter around him started with a soft chuckle and quickly built to a crescendo.

“Okay, I get it. Who fucked with my desk?”

At that moment, I walked past him on my way out of the office to attend a nine o'clock budget meeting. When I got next to him, I whispered, “Pay-back's a bitch, isn't it?”

As I closed the office door, the last thing I heard him mutter was, “You dirty dog.”

***

When I returned from my management meeting, I called Patti in. “I've got a little research job for you. It could be a wild goose chase, but I want you to go back several months and pull every newspaper article about the armored car robbery and murder that appeared in the
Deseret News
, the
Salt Lake Tribune
, and even the
City Weekly
. Then I want you to contact the local TV stations and find out if they did on-camera interviews with any of the witnesses.”

“Mind telling me what this is about?”

“Something Walter Bradshaw said during my interview with him. It's probably nothing but when I told him about Ginsberg's murder, he said that he was pleased that it wasn't that beautiful, young woman.”

“So what?”

“How would Bradshaw have known that she was beautiful and young?”

Patti paused. “Maybe he saw her picture in the newspaper.”

“Bingo. Or maybe she was interviewed by one of the TV stations and he saw that from his jail cell. That's what I want you to find out.”

“I'll get right on it.”

There were two voice messages on my office phone. The first was from Kate and the other was from Captain Jerry Branch. The call from Branch probably had something to do with Walter Bradshaw having received visitors after my interview with him. Maybe now we'd find out whether Walter was conducting gang business from the confines of his house at the state prison.

I called Branch first. “Hi, Jerry, what's up?”

“Walter's wife, Janine, came to see him yesterday afternoon at two-thirty. You weren't out of the unit for more than ten minutes, and he was on the phone with her.”

“Anything interesting come up in their conversation?”

“Not really. Just run-of-the-mill bullshit stuff about family, future plans, and which bodily orifices of hers he intends to violate once he gets out. He didn't say anything about the current case or the murder of Ginsberg, and nothing was spoken in code.”

Knowing that their phone calls were often monitored, gang leaders sometimes spoke on prison phones using code as a way of issuing orders to subordinates on the outside. Prison intelligence units like the SIB invariably had someone skilled at breaking those codes. Discussion in code was a sure sign of criminal gang activity in the community. The conversations usually related to drug trafficking or hits on rival gang members. There was nothing in the Reformed Church file to indicate that the Bradshaw family had ever used code when conversing on prison phones.

Branch continued. “Bradshaw asked Janine to call his lawyer—a guy named Gordon Dixon. His office called this morning and said he'd be here between nine and nine-thirty—no sign of him yet, though. Want me to listen in?”

I glanced at my watch. It was nearly nine-thirty. “Naw, I don't want to put you in a bad spot, Jerry. I'm afraid that's a privileged conversation between lawyer and client. I'll come right over and take care of it myself.” He snorted a laugh and hung up.

I'm not normally prone to violating the rules in order to further an investigation, but on occasion, I've been known to bend a rule to the breaking point. Normally, eavesdropping on a privileged conversation in prison between a lawyer and an inmate client was definitely a no-no unless reasonable grounds existed to believe that something illegal was going on. In this instance, it was a hell of a stretch, and I knew it.

If Bradshaw was directing church activities from inside the prison, and those activities were criminal in nature, as I suspected, he had to be communicating with someone on the outside. He could only be doing that through letters, phone calls, or during non-contact visits. Besides his attorney, Bradshaw's only visitors were members of his immediate family. Surveillance carried out by prison staff hadn't turned up anything suspicious regarding family members. If the illegal communication wasn't occurring through family contact then the only person left was his lawyer, Gordon Dixon. And by law, Dixon's access had been completely unmonitored—at least until now.

I was cloistered in a closet-like office in the prison's administration building wearing a head-set and listening to a lot of line static. I was surrounded by telephone company equipment and sophisticated hi-tech gadgetry designed to eavesdrop on telephone calls and monitor conversations between inmates and their visitors.

When Dixon and Bradshaw picked up their respective phones, the static gave way to absolute clarity. The first thing one of them said in a barely audible whisper was, “Not here.” They exchanged greetings and made small talk until Dixon turned the conversation to a strategy discussion for the preliminary hearing scheduled for later in the day.

After Dixon left Uintah 1, I caught up with Jerry Branch in his office. Branch had observed the visit through one-way glass and saw something that confirmed my suspicions. As the two men stared at each other through the glass partition and reached for the phones, Dixon made a sweeping motion with his left hand, brushing his index finger across his lips in a gesture meant to say, keep quiet. That must have occurred just before I heard somebody whisper, “not here.”

The entire conversation took less than fifteen minutes, and yet I'd learned something important. There was something Dixon didn't want to discuss with Walter Bradshaw over the prison phones, but what was it?