Free Silent Witness by Michael Norman

more. You ever run across him?”
    â€œNever heard of him. If he did much criminal defense work, you’d think one of us would have. Keep me posted on this.”
    I shifted gears. “What’s your take on the missing witness, this Robin Joiner?”
    â€œHard to say. At the time of the armored car robbery, she gave us a local address and then another one for her mother someplace in Nevada. I think the parents might be divorced, but I’m not sure. It’s another detail I just haven’t had time to follow up on.”
    I told Kate about the comment Bradshaw made during our interview and the project I had Patti working on. “Assuming that she isn’t dead or that she hasn’t been snatched by the family, it’s hard to understand why she hasn’t contacted us.”
    â€œMaybe she will. She’s young and probably scared half to death. The truth is we don’t even know for sure that her disappearance is in any way connected to the Bradshaw clan. And if it is, we can at least take some comfort in knowing that when they broke in and tossed her apartment, they didn’t find her.”
    â€œYou could be right. Maybe she just decided to take a break from her classes and get away for a few days. Have you had time to look for her at the university?”
    Kate looked discouraged. “Not yet,” she sighed.
    â€œLook, Kate, since I’m already snooping into her background, I’ll go ahead and follow up with the university and her family. That’s one less thing you’ll have to do.”
    â€œYou’re my hero,” said Kate. “I’ll e-mail a copy of the information I have on her family to your office. It’s not much, but it’ll get you started. In the meantime, I’ll continue contacting family, friends, and Ginsberg’s business associates, and we’ll see where that takes us.”
    ***
    After lunch, I had just enough time to make it to the Matheson courthouse before the start of Bradshaw’s preliminary hearing.
    Transporting dangerous felons to court presented several points of vulnerability. In this case the greatest danger existed with the actual drive from the prison to the courthouse. If the Bradshaw gang had hatched an escape plan for Walter, their best chance for success would be to try to intercept the transportation vehicle while it was traveling to or from court. By the time I got there, the special ops team had already arrived and Walter was sequestered in a holding cell near Judge Wilkinson’s court room.
    Security in the courtroom was tight. Uniformed sheriff’s deputies swarmed the place like flies on a fresh cow pie. Nobody got in without a thorough search. Besides a walk through the metal detector, visitors in significant numbers were being pulled off to one side and treated to a more invasive search.
    Walter Bradshaw was led into the courtroom flanked by two burly sheriff’s deputies. He sat at the defense table next to his lawyer, Gordon Dixon, and an unknown female who was probably a legal assistant. The low murmur in the court room turned to silence as the assembled guests got their first look at the accused. There wasn’t an empty seat in the room.
    The ankle and waist chains had been removed. He was out of his orange prison jump suit and dressed in gray slacks and an open-collared blue dress shirt with no tie. The civilian clothes made him look significantly less menacing I thought—no doubt a good thing from a defense point of view. He nodded and gave a weak smile to his wife and daughter-in-law who were seated in the audience. Glancing around the room, Walter looked almost amused by the spectacle.
    I found two of my investigators, Terry Burnham and Marcy Everest, assisting sheriff’s deputies at a checkpoint which allowed news media personnel through security and into the courtroom. Bradshaw’s impending trial would have drawn media attention anyway, but the disclosure by