Kate looked puzzled. “That name sounds familiar to me, but I can’t place it. Has anybody run him through records?”
“Not as far as I know,” said Porter.
McConnell radioed the dispatch-records office and ran Ginsberg’s name through the system. Before dispatch could respond, it came to her. Why hadn’t she remembered? Arnold Ginsberg was a witness in the upcoming trial of rogue, polygamist leader Walter Bradshaw. In fact, Bradshaw was scheduled for a preliminary hearing in the next few days. She’d heard that from members of the homicide team who’d handled the original investigation. Ginsberg’s murder might have been a coincidence, but McConnell didn’t much believe in coincidences.
A chilling thought entered her mind. There had been another witness in this case, a female college student from the University of Utah. When records came back confirming Ginsberg’s status as a witness in the case, Kate also asked for the name of the second witness and her home address.
A patrol sergeant, Dennis Martinez, met Kate at Robin Joiner’s home. It was an older apartment complex about a mile south and west of the university campus. Joiner occupied a ground floor unit that had a covered patio and a sliding door at the rear. Kate sent Martinez behind the apartment to cover the patio exit while she approached the front door. She saw it immediately. The door had fresh pry marks dug into the wood around the lock. Somebody had used a screwdriver or pry bar to jimmy the lock. Kate drew her nine millimeter, quietly turned the door knob, and pushed open the front door. She paused momentarily. The apartment was dark and quiet.
“Hello, Salt Lake City Police.”
Silence.
She slipped into the apartment and turned on the light in the hallway. She moved quickly through the living room, opened the drapes, and unlocked the sliding patio door. A cursory search of the apartment failed to turn up any sign of Robin Joiner. Equally disturbing, it was clear that the apartment had been tossed. Drawers in the kitchen, bathroom, and bedroom had been pulled open, and the contents dumped on the floor. Somebody was obviously looking for something.
“What do you make of this, Lieutenant?”
Martinez was standing in the small kitchen looking into a round fruit bowl on the dining room table containing two overly ripe bananas in it. On top of the bananas was a hand-printed note. It read: I’M LOOKING FOR YOU AND I WILL FIND YOU.
“I haven’t a clue, Sergeant, but let’s not touch it. I’d like you to sit tight for a few minutes. I’m going to request a forensics team and see if I can locate an on-site apartment manager. Maybe the manager will be able to tell us something about the whereabouts of Ms. Joiner.”
“Okay.”
Outside McConnell found an ‘apartment manager’ sign stuck in the front lawn with an arrow pointing south to an adjacent building. She located a woman who was just putting the finishing touches on a lease agreement with a new tenant. When she finished, Kate introduced herself and flashed credentials.
“Sorry to bother you, but I’m looking for the tenant in apartment number 106. Robin Joiner is her name.”
“I haven’t seen Robin for the past couple of days but that’s not unusual. Is everything okay?”
“I hope so, but we’re not sure. Does Robin rent the unit by herself or does she have a roommate?”
“The lease is in Robin’s name only, no roommate as far as I know.”
“How about friends? Do you have any idea who she hangs out with?”
“That’s almost impossible to keep track of. Most of our tenants are students attending Westminster College or the University of Utah. We’ve got people coming and going at all hours of the day and night all the time.”
“Do you recall ever seeing her with anyone?”
She paused. “Come to think of it, I guess I have seen Robin a time or two, mostly with young women I assumed were her friends, probably students. But I don’t have any names for you. Sorry. Can I ask what this is about?”
“Robin is a witness in a case of ours. I just need to ask her a few questions. How about boyfriends? Anybody come to mind?”
Another pause. “Yeah, one guy a few times. Never met him though. I’m sorry that I’m not being more helpful.”
“That’s okay. You’re doing the best you can. Do you think you could describe the boyfriend for me?”
“Sure. He was a cute guy, tall, maybe six-two, six-three, slim build, sandy hair, fair complexion.”
“About how old?”
“I’d say early twenties.”
“Thanks. Would you happen to know what kind of vehicle she drives?”
She smiled. “I can help you with that one. It’s an older, red, subcompact, a Honda, I think, but let me check her lease application.” It turned out to be a 98 Honda Civic with Nevada plates. On her way back to the apartment, Kate checked the parking lot. No sign of the car.
McConnell didn’t like the feel of any of this. Could Robin Joiner have suffered the same fate as Arnold Ginsberg? The note left in her apartment gave Kate hope that the intruders hadn’t found Joiner, at least not yet. But where could she be? It had Walter Bradshaw’s name written all over it, yet he was sitting in a cell at the Utah State Prison.
Kate reached for her cell phone and made two calls. The first brought a crime scene unit to Robin Joiner’s apartment. The second call went to the home of Sam Kincaid.
Chapter Three
It was nearly eleven o’clock when I heard the phone ring. I couldn’t get it, but I knew Aunt June would. It was the third consecutive night that I hadn’t been able to get my nine-year-old daughter, Sara, settled down in bed. Since the traumatic events surrounding members of the Commission five months earlier, things in our home had not been the same. The incident traumatized Sara beyond anything I could have imagined. Most nights she wanted to sleep with either me or Aunt June. Putting her to bed alone required leaving the bedroom light on and was usually accompanied by stalling and lots of tears. I had her back in weekly counseling sessions with a child psychologist.
Aunt June handed me the phone. “It’s Kate.”
“We missed you tonight. Is everything okay?”
She sighed. “Sorry I couldn’t make it. Homicides never seem to happen at convenient times anymore.”
“Ain’t that the truth. Is there anything I can help you with?”
“Be careful what you wish for, but, as a matter of fact, there is. I’ve got a disturbing murder, maybe two, and I think they might be connected to Walter Bradshaw.”
“Hmm. In what way?”
“I don’t know whether you remember the witnesses from the armored car robbery and murder—there were two. Tonight we found one of them murdered. We can’t find the other one, and it looks like her apartment has been tossed.”
“That’s not good, but I can’t say I’m surprised. With the other family members still at large, and the old man in prison, it stands to reason that they might try something.”
“That’s exactly what I’ve been thinking. Maybe we should have anticipated that something like this might happen and taken steps to protect those witnesses.”
“Don’t be so hard on yourself, Kate. Nobody could have predicted this. Let’s just hope the second witness is still alive and you can find her before they do.”
Kate paused. “You mean I better hope the second witness is still alive and WE can find her before they do.”
“Now I get it. You’ll have to pardon me. I can be a little slow on the uptake sometimes.”
“I’ve noticed.”
I laughed. “Don’t be a smart ass, particularly when you’ve got your hand out asking for help.”
Her turn to laugh. “Good point. Walter’s preliminary hearing is scheduled for the day after tomorrow.”
“I’m aware of that. We’ve been asked to lean on every snitch in the joint to see if anybody has heard any scuttlebutt about the whereabouts or intentions of the rest of the Bradshaw clan. Prisoner transportation and courtroom security are top priorit
ies right now.”
“Learn anything from your snitches?”
“Lot’s of rumors, but so far, nothing reliable. The most consistent story we’re hearing is that the family split and has gone into hiding somewhere in southern Utah, along the Arizona strip. But I don’t put much credence in that.”
“Because?”
“First, consider the source. The inmate rumor mill is rife with misinformation. Besides, I just don’t believe that the Bradshaw family is willing to abandon the prophet to whatever fate awaits him, which might well be a date with the executioner.”
“Makes sense,” said Kate. “You think they’re unwilling to put Bradshaw’s fate in the hands of the Lord?”
“Doubt it. What kind of help do you need?”
“Why don’t you start with Walter Bradshaw. Why don’t you pay him a visit and see what he has to say. And I know you’re going to love this one, but how much will it cost me to get you to attend the autopsy?”
“It’s going to be very expensive but everything’s negotiable. In the meantime, what will you be doing?”
“I’ll start scheduling interviews. There’s going to be a boatload of people to talk to. I’ll also find out what the CSI unit has come up with, although it might be too soon on that score. After then we can hook up and see where things stand.”
“Sounds like a plan.”
“What about your new boss? Should you touch base with him before you commit to work on this one?”
“Thanks for asking. The rules of the game have definitely changed, but I think he’ll go along.”
The new boss Kate referred to was Benjamin Cates. Cates had recently been appointed executive director of the Utah Department of Corrections.
In the aftermath of the massive scandal that had rocked the corrections department, the governor, with the encouragement of the state legislature, had moved quickly to make changes. His first step was to fire my former boss, Norm Sloan, and replace him with a reform-minded, retired sheriff from the King County Sheriff’s Department in Seattle, Washington.
From what I had learned, Benjamin Cates was a highly regarded sheriff who also had the responsibility of running one of the largest jails in the country. He purportedly ran a tight ship and had a zero tolerance policy for staff who tried to operate outside the rules. That was a good thing.
Cates had wasted no time cleaning house. He left probation and parole largely intact, but came down with a vengeance on the prison. He demoted several prison managers, reassigned others, and fired two, including the second highest ranking member of the department, the Director of Institutional Operations. Several other supervisors with enough years in the system simply opted to retire.
As for me, I had somehow managed to survive what the newspapers had dubbed the “weekend massacre.” My unit, the Special Investigations Branch (SIB), had emerged from the scandal relatively unscathed. The closet thing to criticism we received came from a couple of state legislators who made vague public statements that the scandal should have been discovered and squashed before it ever became one.
Yet my relationship with Cates felt like a tentative one. I was under the microscope. He knew it, and so did I.
Chapter Four
I left my Park City home early the next morning and headed for my office at the state prison. Juggling a cell phone, a cup of hot coffee, and a cinnamon roll, while rocketing down I-80 with the other Nascar commuters, was a serious challenge.
I phoned Patti Wheeler, my secretary, and asked her to pull the inmate file on Walter Bradshaw. I had been worried about Bradshaw and his impending, preliminary hearing even before the call from Kate the previous night. The prospect of transporting a high-risk inmate, like Bradshaw, was daunting knowing that the other fugitive members of his family were still at large. Add to that the murder of one of the witnesses and the apparent disappearance of another. Mere coincidence seemed an unlikely explanation for this chain of events.
My immediate challenge was how to approach Bradshaw for the interview. It wasn’t like I could play the old carrot-and-stick game. He was already being held without bail in the maximum security unit at the prison. That’s living about as deprived as one can get. In addition, he was facing a plethora of new criminal charges sufficient to keep him breathing stale prison air for the remainder of his days. His record as an inmate wasn’t particularly good either. The prison staff viewed him as an agitator and a trouble-maker. Even among the inmate population, Bradshaw was perceived to be at the far end of the nut-meter.
About the only carrot I had at my disposal might be the opportunity to have him reclassified and moved into a medium security housing unit where life would be easier. The difficulty with that option was that I would have to convince the prison classification committee that moving Bradshaw to a less secure housing unit was in the best interest of the prison and something he deserved—both difficult sells. From experience I knew that convincing the classification committee to transfer an inmate based solely on providing snitch information, while difficult, wasn’t impossible. I’d done it before. But it required me to expend political capital, something I didn’t relish doing.
Bradshaw had been captured minutes after the stick-up and had been held initially at the Salt Lake County Jail. The state parole board immediately dispatched a hearing officer to the jail who determined there was probable cause to believe that he was in violation of several conditions of his parole agreement. That triggered his transfer back to the prison, a fact that undoubtedly made the sheriff’s office happy. It made us responsible for not only holding him, but also for his transportation to and from court.
When I got to the office, I called Patti in. “I need you to do a couple of other things for me when you get a minute.”
“That ‘when you get a minute’ usually means you want it done yesterday. Which is it?”
“Yesterday.”
“That’s what I thought. What do you need?”
“Get me a copy of Walter Bradshaw’s visitor and correspondence log. I need to know who is on his approved visitor list and with whom he corresponds. Also, get me a list of his outgoing telephone calls for the past month.” Tracking inmate mail and phone calls, while laborious, wasn’t difficult. They weren’t allowed to receive incoming telephone calls, and we selectively monitored calls they made to the outside world.
“Anything else?”
“Yeah, three things, actually. Call the executive director’s office. See if I can get in to see him later this morning. Then call the court clerk for Judge Homer Wilkinson. He’s the judge scheduled to hear Bradshaw’s preliminary hearing tomorrow. Try to get me an appointment to see him this afternoon. And as much as I hate it, find out when the state medical examiner’s office has scheduled the autopsy for Arnold Ginsberg.”
She giggled. “What?” I asked.
“Oh, I just wondered,” she said loudly, “since you’re going to an autopsy, do I need to order some fresh pipe tobacco or would you just like smelling salts?” In the background, I could hear somebody laughing.
“I suppose I’ll be hearing about this for the next month.”
“Count on it,” she said.
***
The morning wake-up bell sounded promptly as it always did at six-thirty in Uintah I, the Utah state prison’s maximum security housing unit. Walter Bradshaw woke with a start to the sound of the high-pitched whistle and sighed. He rolled stiffly from his side onto his back and then continued the roll until he sat upright with his bare feet touching the cold, concrete floor. He dropped quickly to the floor where he performed a daily routine of fifty pushups followed by two-hundred sit-ups and a couple of stretching exercises for his forty-five year old limbs.
Life inside max was austere at best. That suited Bradshaw because it gave him ample time to read the scriptures and study the words of the first prophet, Joseph Smith. His trials were all a part of God’s plan, of that he was certain. The eight by twelve foot cell was encased in c
oncrete and steel. The bed, if you could call it that, was a single concrete slab attached to a concrete wall with a too-thin mattress tossed on top. Anchored to the floor in one corner was a toilet with a small steel sink mounted on the wall next to it.
His routine consisted of twenty-three hours a day spent in his house with one hour out for exercise and a five minute shower. He was required to stand four times a day for scheduled counts. Meals were served in his cell. He couldn’t have a job, and he was not allowed to attend prison programs or school. Excluding his lawyer, he was allowed two non-contact visits a week. All of this because prison administrators had decided that he was the leader of a so-called Security Threat Group, or STG. As far as Bradshaw was concerned, the prison administration was a gang.
Bradshaw was the founder and self-proclaimed leader of the Reformed Church of the Divine Christ. He had founded the Church in late 2002 after being expelled by Warren Jeffs from the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. Bradshaw was determined to establish a polygamist religious sanctuary in the desert of southern Utah. There, he and his small band of followers would be free to practice their religious beliefs without interference from the government while at the same time insulated from the evils of the secular world.
Just thinking about Warren Jeffs made Bradshaw angry—the kind of anger that sits in your belly, unrelenting, like hot acid. It had been excruciating watching Warren manipulate his way to head of the church, systematically eliminating anyone he perceived to be a threat. Any who dared question his judgment or authority were unceremoniously banished. Even some who hadn’t questioned, teenage boys like his sons, were tossed from the community like used garbage. How could people have been so naïve?
He detested Warren Jeffs. He recalled the shock when a group of men—his friends—came to his home to take his first wife, Janine, and her sister wives, Dora, and Emma to their new husbands. He could still see the self-righteous looks on the faces of the brethren.
The humiliation of not being able to fight back, to defend his family, haunted him every day. Seeing fear on the faces of his younger children was excruciating. Some were crying. Others just withdrew. All of them learned a harsh lesson that day about obedience under Warren Jeffs. And when Janine refused to go, she had been forced to leave their precious daughters behind. There was simply no way to take them. Did the children understand? Did they feel betrayed? He promised that he’d come back for them, but now he knew he’d never get them back. The oldest two had already been married off.
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