Silent Witness (9 page)

Chapter Sixteen

When we left Lamb's Café, Kate and I parted company. We planned to meet later for dinner at a new place somebody in her office recommended. When it comes to restaurants, I have to admit to being a creature of habit. Once I find one I like, I'll eat there over and over again. Kate, on the other hand, is always on the look-out for a new and different dining experience. Slowly, and by sheer force of will, she has been expanding my culinary experiences.

I had a late afternoon date at the university with the rest of Robin Joiner's study group although they didn't know it. That left me with just enough time for a stop at the Utah State Bar Association office near downtown. The Bar's Office of Professional Conduct was responsible for investigating allegations of lawyer misconduct and meeting out disciplinary action when appropriate.

I checked my cell and noticed that I had a new voicemail message. It was Patti, asking me to call her. She answered on the first ring.

“Hi, Patti. What's up?”

“Regarding Robin Joiner—no adult record whatsoever. She was arrested twice in Las Vegas as a juvenile, both misdemeanors, one for minor in possession of alcohol; the other was a marijuana possession charge. She received fines and community service in both cases. She was never formally supervised by Nevada youth corrections.”

“Nothing very unusual about any of that,” I said.

“There's more. The juvenile court referred me to a caseworker in the child welfare department. It seems that all was not well in the Joiner home. Her father has never been in the picture. The mother, Betty, is a recovering drug addict, apparently in and out of treatment programs multiple times over the years. Anyway, she's supposed to be clean now and working as a Black Jack dealer in a Mesquite casino. Robin has a long history of foster home placements. The records show that she was a reported runaway on three different occasions.”

“Sounds like a difficult childhood,” I said. “Have you been able to locate the mother?”

“The address you got from the university records seems to be the current one. I found a phone number at that address listed under the name, B. Joiner. I called. It's a working number. I didn't leave a message—figured you'd want to do that.”

“Thanks, Patti. I'll follow up with a phone call when I get back to the office. Anything yet on Bradshaw's lawyer, Gordon Dixon?”

“I'm workin on it. I should have something for you shortly.”

“Call me when you do.”

***

I parked in the Bar Association's underground parking terrace and took the elevator up one floor to the public reception area. I suspected that the Utah Bar Association would be about as accessible as CIA headquarters or perhaps Fort Knox. Trying to get information about misbehaving lawyers was always a challenge. Fortunately, I had a contact but not one I called on often.

I signed in, received a visitor's badge, and was ushered into the office of Melissa Miller. I had known Miller for nearly fifteen years. She came into the Salt Lake County District Attorney's Office a short time after I began my career in the corrections department. After several years of prosecuting bad guys, she accepted a position with the Bar Association prosecuting naughty lawyers whose behaviors ranged from ethics violations to outright criminal conduct.

Miller had been my only misadventure in the weeks after the breakup of my marriage to Nicole. She was between boyfriends, and I was trying to adjust to the notion of being single again after eleven years of marriage. Our encounter was a disaster. We ran into each other in a downtown Salt Lake City nightclub frequented by cops and lawyers. Long story short, after too many drinks, we ended up at her place in the sack. I couldn't get it up. She took it personally and was seriously pissed. After that, we avoided each other for months.

In time, things became more comfortable. She remarried, and I adjusted to life as a single parent, avoiding the dating scene almost completely. That finally changed when fate brought Kate and me together.

Miller came around her desk and gave me a smile and a polite hug. She invited me to sit while she closed her office door. “Gosh, Sam, what's it been, almost a year?”

“All of that, Melissa. How's the newlywed?”

“Couldn't be happier. He's a real sweetheart—works in the public defender's office. Thanks for asking. What brings you to see me today, Sam?”

“Business, I'm afraid.”

“God, not another lawyer trying to smuggle dope into the prison for one of his clients, I hope.”

“Not this time,” I said. “No dope or guns, but I might have one who's passing gang information into and out of the prison. What can you tell me about a lawyer by the name of Gordon Dixon?”

“Is this the guy I read about in the newspaper who represents the Mormon fundamentalist, Walter Bradshaw?”

“One and the same,” I said.

She turned to her computer screen and inputted his name. “Okay. Well, our records show that he graduated from the University of Arizona Law School ten years ago, passed the Arizona State Bar exam one year later, and ran a solo practice in Flagstaff for the next five years. He passed the Utah Bar three and a half years ago and opened another solo practice with an office in Murray. This shows that his license is still active in Arizona.”

“Any disciplinary record or complaints about the guy?”

She paused. “There is something.” She made a couple of additional key strokes and switched to a different screen. “Our records show that Mr. Dixon was arrested for Disorderly Conduct in Tucson while an undergraduate student at the University of Arizona. It seems he was forcibly removed from a lecture hall after continually interrupting a speaker who had been invited to campus to discuss the sexual abuse of young girls living in polygamist communities along the Arizona Strip.”

“That might explain his interest in providing legal representation to the leader of a Mormon fundamentalist group that just happens to practice polygamy,” I said.

Miller was still reading something from her computer screen. “We've had two minor complaints about him since he came to Utah. In one, a client complained that Dixon failed to return a small amount of money from a retainer. He eventually did. We gave him a letter of reprimand on that one. In the other case, a client claimed that he failed to complete legal work after she'd paid him. He denied the allegation, kissed and made up with her, and she subsequently withdrew the complaint. That's all we've got.”

“You've been more than helpful, Melissa. I can't thank you enough.” At that moment, my cell phone rang. It was Patti calling with information about Gordon Dixon.

“Yeah, Patti. What have you got for me?”

“Something I think you're going to find most interesting, two things, actually. Joan Dixon is actually Mrs. Gordon Dixon, but that's not the interesting part. The interesting part is that Joan Dixon's maiden name was Bradshaw. She's Walter Bradshaw's younger sister.”

“Wow,” I said. “That helps put some pieces of the puzzle into perspective.”

“And that's not all,” said Patti. “Gordon, through his LLC, holds the deed of trust to nearly two hundred acres of land in the desert of southern Utah off Highway 89, somewhere between Kanab and a little town called Big Water. I guess I'm not familiar with Big Water.”

“It's a small town just north of Lake Powell that used to be the stronghold of another polygamist sect that was headed by Alex Joseph. He's been dead a while.”

I left the Utah Bar Association feeling that I now had a better understanding of exactly how Gordon Dixon fit into the picture. Dixon was the front guy, the legal mouthpiece who handled the church's legal and business affairs. I decided it was time to pay him a visit.

***

Robin Joiner had begun to feel a growing sense of desperation. The phone conversation with the cop, Kincaid was his name, had been disturbing. From him, she had learned that they had broken in to her apartment and her car. They were hunting for her, of that she was certain.

She was also concerned about the fact that the cops had apprehended Michael Baker while he was trying to retrieve her car. If she couldn't recover her car or go back to her apartment, what was she to do? Calling home to her dear mother wasn't a good option. Not only was her mother unreliable, but maybe she was being watched. Since the cops had identified Michael, did they also know about Tracy Sanders and her other friends from the university study group? Even worse, if the cops had gotten this close to her, how far behind could the Bradshaws be?

Limited options or not, Joiner needed to make a move. And move she did. First, she checked out of the motel and caught the city bus, which took her closer to downtown. There she checked into another motel that turned out to be as big a dive as the one she'd just left. The new motel was located three blocks from the Outback Steakhouse where her best friend, Tracy Sanders, worked. Joiner called the restaurant and learned that Sanders was scheduled to work the lunch shift the following day from eleven until three-thirty. She would contact Sanders when she got off work the next day. In the meantime, she'd lay low in her new digs.

Chapter Seventeen

At four-thirty in the afternoon, I found myself wandering the halls of the Graduate School of Social Work looking for a third floor classroom. I'd spent enough time on the University of Utah campus over the past couple of days to begin feeling like I was back in school again.

I poked my head into room 322 at the same time Dr. Joyce Barrows looked up from her lecture notes and saw me standing in the doorway. She interrupted the class, and marched me and four students—Michael Baker and three females—to an empty classroom across the hall. Baker didn't seem overly pleased to see me again, especially so soon.

“Would you like me to join you, Detective Kincaid?” asked Barrows.

“Please do.” She closed the door behind her. I didn't see any harm in her remaining, and perhaps her presence would engender a bit more cooperation from the members of Joiner's study group.

I explained briefly who I was and the purpose of my visit. I wondered if Baker had already done that for me.

I started with the obvious question: “Other than Michael, who received a phone call from Robin, have any of you heard from her during the past three days?”

Nobody had.

“Do any of you know where I might find her?”

Nobody did.

“Does Robin have any friends or relatives living locally who she might go to for help?”

Tracy Sanders spoke. “I don't think Rob has any family in Salt Lake. She doesn't have any brothers or sisters. Her Mother lives somewhere in Nevada. As for friends, I'm probably Rob's closest friend, and I haven't spoken with her since our study group meeting in the library three nights ago. I called her apartment a couple of times and left messages, but she never returned my calls.”

Dr. Barrows interjected herself into the discussion. “Can any of you think of anything that might help Detective Kincaid locate Robin? It seems perfectly clear to me that she's in trouble, and we need to do everything we can to help the police find her.”

“Wait a minute,” said Sanders. “One time Robin stopped by my apartment to let me borrow her lecture notes from a class that I'd missed. She had a cute guy with her. I assumed he was her boyfriend.”

“Do you recall his name?”

She paused. “Yeah, I think she introduced him as Joey, but I'm not positive.”

“Is he a student here at the U?”

“I don't know. He didn't talk much, and Rob didn't say.”

“Any idea about how I might be able to find him?”

“Sorry,” said Sanders. “Rob never talked much about the guys in her life. The subject rarely came up, and when it did, she usually didn't have much to say.”

Nobody else in the study group had ever met the guy.

I gave business cards to everybody and tried to convince them to contact me immediately if they heard from Joiner. I left the meeting with the distinct feeling that nobody would.

I hadn't learned much about Robin Joiner from the members of her study group. I sensed that she was a very private, young woman, even to the exclusion of close friends like Tracy Sanders. I wasn't sure what to do next, but contacting her mother in Mesquite, Nevada, seemed like a good next step.

***

I left the university and hooked up with Kate at a restaurant on the edge of the Avenues District near downtown Salt Lake City. The place was called the East India Star, billed as the finest in traditional Indian cuisine. We had never tried it. Someone in the D.A.'s office had recommended it to Kate. I'd suggested the Black Angus Steakhouse, but, in the tug-of-war that followed, ended up agreeing to try the East India Star. The closest thing to Indian food I had ever eaten was fry bread and mutton stew on the Navaho reservation.

Dinner out actually served multiple purposes. It gave us a chance to decompress, enjoy some private time together, and in this instance, it gave us the opportunity to exchange theories about the case and organize the next steps. So far, we'd been following leads largely independent of each another, and I was beginning to feel disorganized, never a good thing in a homicide case. My old mentor who had run the SIB for years prior to my taking over had an old saying mounted on his office wall that read, “If you don't know where you're going, any road will take you there.” He was adamant that being disorganized was exactly how not to run any kind of an investigation.

Kate was already seated when I arrived. She was sipping a class of red wine, probably a Cab, and perusing the restaurant menu. It was early, and the place hadn't begun to fill.

“You look a little pensive,” I said. It was then that I noticed the empty wine glass sitting next to her on the table. The glass she was sipping from now was her second.

“I'm a little perplexed, actually.”

“And why is that?”

“Just before I left the office, I got a call from the crime lab. It seems that our partial thumb print doesn't match any of the suspects. Go figure.”

“You mean that among the Allred cousins and Joseph and Albert Bradshaw, you didn't get a print match.”

“That's what I'm telling you. I thought it was a slam dunk. We've got one dead witness and a second on the run. In Joiner's apartment, we've got prints from Randy Allred and Joseph Bradshaw plastered everywhere. Albert Bradshaw's prints were all over the shotgun and the stolen Neon. How could one of them not be the killer?”

“Yeah. I'd have given odds that the print would have matched one of them. But here's something to think about. Nobody knows for sure how many members belong to the Reformed Church of the Divine Christ.”

“True,” said Kate.

“We know that Walter is the self-proclaimed prophet along with his two sons and the Allred cousins. That leaves Walter's wife and Albert's two wives. As far as we know, the other son, Joseph, and Robby and Randy Allred, don't have wives. But there could be other members of the church that law enforcement intelligence hasn't identified.”

“You're saying that maybe the killers belong to the church but just haven't showed up on anybody's radar screen.”

“Exactly.”

“Possible, I guess. Frankly, I'm not sure what to think,” said Kate.

“Are you having the print run through the Automated Fingerprint Identification System?”

“Yeah, they're checking AFIS locally and statewide. If we don't get a hit on that, we'll submit to the FBI in Virginia and run the print through the national database.”

“What else have you found?”

“I canvassed the neighborhood. Nothing unusual from the neighbors concerning the vic's relationship with Rodney Plow. No fights, disturbances, rumors, nothing.”

“And his alibi.”

“It checked out. I back-tracked his movements, and he went everyplace he said he did—his timeline was accurate, too.”

“What other leads have you got?”

“I found a message late this afternoon from Ginsberg's secretary. She said she's got something important to tell me, but she didn't want to go into it on the phone. She was gone by the time I called her back. I plan to go see her first thing in the morning. Want to come along?”

“Probably, but let me see what I've got going in the morning. Is there anything else?”

“Yeah, there's the adultery angle. I've got an appointment tomorrow with the attorney handling Ginsberg's estate. We need to figure out who stood to gain financially from Arnold's death. In particular, I want to know if Rodney has been provided for, and if so, for how much.”

“You're going to need a warrant.”

“Maybe. The attorney is a guy. I'll try to charm the information out of him. It saves time and it's worked before. I can always go get a warrant.”

I was grinning.

“What?” she said.

“You could charm that information off of me, right along with my jockeys, without a warrant.” I quipped.

“Pervert.”

I sighed. “I know.”

I let Kate order dinner for both of us. The menu at the East India Star might as well have been printed in Greek. My only request was that she order something with meat, lamb excluded, something that wouldn't require me to wash it down with a bottle of Tums. Fortunately, I was able to comprehend the imported beer list. Two Coronas later, dinner was served.

We ate in silence, which was fine with both of us. My chicken was okay. It had been prepared in some kind of yellowish sauce that tasted mildly like ginger. The flavor seemed foreign to me (no pun intended) but all-in-all I judged it a passable meal. For desert, we opted for two skinny vanilla lattes.

Over the lattes, Kate said, “You've just experienced a first, Sam. How did you like the Indian food?”

I looked at her for a moment. “Well, Kate, I'd say the meal was average, but at least it was expensive. What did you think?”

She blinked. “What?” Slowly her face broke into a smile, and she delivered a sharp elbow to my ribcage.

“Actually, I didn't think the food was too great either. We'll scratch this place off our preferred dining list.”

“What did you learn this afternoon from Joiner's study group?”

“Not a hell of a lot. She's got no siblings, few close friends, no contact with her father, and a mother with a long drug history who works for one of the casinos in Mesquite. Oh, and a possible boyfriend named Joey that nobody knows anything about.”

“God, that's helpful,” said Kate. A moment passed. “What was the boyfriend's name again?”

“Joey.” Then it hit me. “Joey, as in Joseph.”

We looked at each other without speaking before Kate said, “Are you thinking what I'm thinking?”

“Yeah, seems like a helleva long shot though, don't you think?”

“Absolutely, but let's check it out?”

“No question. One of the study group members, a Tracy Sanders, met this Joey. I'll pull Joseph Bradshaw's mug shot and show it to her. We'll see if she can identify him.”

“While you're at it,” said Kate, “drop by Joiner's apartment complex and show Bradshaw's photo to the apartment manager. She met a boyfriend, too. Wouldn't it be interesting if it turns out to be yours truly, Joseph Bradshaw? Think of the possible implications of that.”