Read Online The Witness by Josh McDowell - Free Book Online

where she could wine and dine her rich friends, a place she could see and be seen by the glitterati that came each summer to play.
    The phone rang. Goddard answered it immediately, then hung up and announced, “He’s coming. Everyone out.”
    Goddard’s team didn’t need to be told twice. No one wanted to be around when the Skeleton arrived. They had all worked with him before. So the crime scene photographers, the detectives dusting for fingerprints, the officers taking measurements, and those finding and marking shell casings all finished their work, packed up their equipment, and exited the flat as quickly and quietly as they could. They were essentially finished anyway. The bodies had been removed. They were just wrapping up loose ends. If they were needed again, they would return. For now, they were more than happy to leave, Colette DuVall included.
    A few minutes after they had all departed, the elevator door opened, and Lemieux stepped off.
    “Inspector, welcome,” Goddard said.
    Lemieux didn’t nod. He didn’t speak. He didn’t smile. He did not even take Goddard’s outstretched hand. Rather, he immediately began moving through the living room—slowly and methodically—stopping occasionally to bend down and examine certain numbered evidence markers and bloodstains. He seemed particularly interested in studying the angles from which the shots had been fired.
    “When you’re ready, I can show you the apartment across the way, the one the assassin—or assassins—used,” Goddard offered. “My men have recovered the rifle and a scope.”
    But Lemieux remained silent. He was counting shell casings. Then he began counting bullet holes. He moved from one to another, noting the rounds embedded in the walls and the bookshelves and those riddled in the desk and chairs and sofas, continually looking back at the building from which they apparently had been fired.
    “No fingerprints on the shells from the other apartment, I’m afraid,” Goddard continued.
    But Lemieux again said nothing. The silence was deafening.
    Goddard studied the man as he slowly circulated the living room. He was almost six feet five inches tall and frightfully thin, and he wore a long black London Fog raincoat that hung on his bony shoulders like some kind of burial shroud. His face was drawn and somewhat gaunt, and though at 62 he was younger than Goddard’s father, he was just as bald, with a small tuft of gray hair poking up over each ear and a narrow, graying mustache under a proud and pointed nose. The one glaring difference between Lemieux and Goddard’s father was that Goddard was pretty sure his father still had a heartbeat.
    But despite the man’s cold demeanor, it was Lemieux’s eyes that bothered Goddard the most. They were small and dark brown, and while they effectively communicated the man’s powerful intellect and his legendary photographic memory, they projected not a hint of warmth or compassion—not even for the murdered victims or their families, much less for any of the men trying their hardest to find the killer or killers and bring them to justice.
    How could such a cold man have such a sterling reputation throughout the whole of Europe? Goddard wondered. Yes, the cases he had solved were still studied by criminologists the world over. But what of the other cases under his authority, the ones that had died slow and painful deaths of starvation and neglect? Didn’t anyone take these into consideration when the great Marcel Lemieux came to mind?
    “I cannot tell you how much I love the look and the feel and the smell of a fresh murder scene,” Lemieux said at last as he worked his way around the room. “It is like a beautiful painting, one by a master like Monet or Manet. It is pointillism, Monsieur Goddard. Up close, no single clue—no single dot or speck of color—seems to make much sense by itself. But when you step back, when you close your eyes and breathe it all in, when you stop to see the bigger