The Witness by Josh McDowell Read Free Book Online

Inspector Marcel Lemieux.
    There was no other way to put it. The idea of having to talk to him again, much less work with him, turned Goddard’s stomach. But what could he do? Lemieux was leading the investigation of the kidnapping of Claudette Ramsey and the murder of Brigitte Ramsey. The man had to be told. He would want to see the crime scene and the video from the surveillance cameras inside Ramsey’s flat. He would have to know about this Accad fellow, who could turn out to be the best witness they had, if they could only find him.
    Lemieux was something of a living legend throughout the police forces of Europe. He had solved some of the continent’s biggest cases—murder, kidnapping, bank robbery; the kind of cases that involved the rich and famous and those with very powerful friends in very high places.
    But Goddard still couldn’t stand him. They had worked together on two previous cases, and both experiences had left nothing but a bad taste in Goddard’s mouth.
    The first time was when a French diplomat on holiday in Monte Carlo had gone missing for three days. The wife had received a ransom note but was warned not to pay. A week later, Goddard and his men found the diplomat’s body washed up onshore. The same day, a waitress at one of the casinos was found dead, an apparent suicide. Was there a connection? Goddard began interviewing all of the woman’s friends and relatives. Within forty-eight hours, he had compiled circumstantial evidence that the two cases were connected and had even been able to put together a rather compelling list of three suspects, none of whom had convincing alibis for the days in question.
    But then Lemieux swooped in and essentially yanked the case away from him. Not to solve it more quickly, Goddard would later note to colleagues. Indeed, the case was never solved at all. Instead, leads went cold. Suspects walked. Key evidence was mishandled or disappeared. And Lemieux couldn’t have been more pompous or rude during the entire “investigation,” if that is what it could be called. In time, Lemieux declared the case “virtually unsolvable” and went back to Paris, leaving resentment and ill will in his wake.
    Goddard’s second run-in with Lemieux occurred in the late summer of 2003 when a wealthy French shipping magnate and his sons disappeared after taking his gleaming new $25-million yacht out of Monte Carlo’s harbor for a quick spin around the Mediterranean.
    Goddard remembered it like it was yesterday. The urgent phone call from headquarters just after 6 a.m. The hysterical wife. The media feeding frenzy. The sensational headlines.
    It wasn’t every day a man of such prominence—a close friend of the French prime minister—vanished into thin air. But he and his sons were nowhere to be found. No bodies. No blood. No clues of any kind. Everyone demanded immediate answers. For days, the Parisian press hammered away at the Monte Carlo authorities, accusing them of dragging their feet. Goddard was under tremendous pressure to produce results—a fingerprint, a witness, anything to show progress. He didn’t eat. He barely slept. He ran his men ragged and almost had to be hospitalized himself for exhaustion.
    And then it came. The break they had been working for, praying for. Goddard discovered that the shipping magnate’s sons owed money to a man they thought was a Russian banker but who in fact worked for the Russian mafia. Goddard then discovered that the Russian owned a flat in Monte Carlo and had been spotted in town just days earlier. What’s more, two of the Russian’s associates had been seen wandering around the harbor on the morning of the men’s disappearance, asking about renting a speedboat.
    Momentum began building. Goddard had a suspect, a motive. He requested permission from his superiors to fly to Moscow to follow the trail. But to his shock, he was denied.
    Forty-five minutes later, Lemieux walked into his office, claimed jurisdiction of the case, and