Silent Witness by Michael Norman Page A

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.”
    â€œMind telling me what this is about?”
    â€œSomething 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.”
    â€œSo what?”
    â€œHow would Bradshaw have known that she was beautiful and young?”
    Patti paused. “Maybe he saw her picture in the newspaper.”
    â€œBingo. 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.”
    â€œI’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?”
    â€œWalter’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.”
    â€œAnything interesting come up in their conversation?”
    â€œNot 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