The Witness (7 page)

“Hostel Rabat,” he said at last. “If I can get myself there. If not, it’s going to be a cold night.”

The pain from his shoulder was beginning to cloud his mind.
Please, just get this over with!

“So no drugs?” the gendarme asked again.

“Yeah, I got some right in my pocket. You want a hit?” Quickly realizing that sarcasm was probably not the best tack to take, he resorted to pleading. “Come on, bro, my plane’s leaving any minute.”

“May I look in your bag?” the man asked, obviously unconvinced.

Marwan said yes, but no sooner had the words come out of his mouth than he realized that in his haste he had never checked to see what was in the garment bag he’d taken from the honeymoon suite in Monte Carlo. He had no earthly idea if it was the bride’s or the groom’s. And he was about to find out in the sight of eight well-armed men.

The gendarme began with Marwan’s backpack.

More blue jeans. A couple of old T-shirts, desperately in need of some laundry soap. A few pairs of dirty underwear—a few clean pairs as well. A charger cable for the iPod. A dog-eared paperback of John Grisham’s novel
The Firm
. A half-eaten bag of M&M’s. A small shaving kit. An old toothbrush. A half-empty tube of Crest. Some deodorant. And a small velvet box with a small gold ring.

“Getting engaged?” the gendarme asked.

For the first time, Marwan saw a glimmer of humanity in the man’s eyes. A flicker of sadness, rapidly turning back to steel.

Use that,
he told himself. “Dude, that’s why I’m here. I put three years into her, and she turned me down flat. Said I had no ambition. Said I couldn’t support her lifestyle. Can you believe that?”

The gendarme cracked an ever-so-faint smile and shook his head. Then he repacked the backpack and opened the garment bag. Marwan’s heart almost stopped.

To his horror, the bag was filled with women’s clothes and cosmetics. Dresses. Halter tops. Tight jeans. High heels and flats. And lingerie that left little to the imagination. They were all new—some articles still had store price tags dangling from them. They were all expensive. And they all begged for an explanation that Marwan Accad—aka Jack Cardell—did not have.

Marwan wondered if he looked as surprised as he felt.

“Perhaps I should call you
Jacqueline
Cardell, instead of Jacques,
non
?” the gendarme asked.

The man began to laugh, as did his colleagues, most of whom seemed to have become intrigued by this California beach bum.

Marwan forced himself to laugh too. “Nah, stuff she left in our apartment. I’ve had this vision of building me a bonfire out of this stuff one night on the beach, then surfing her out of my system until sunrise.”

The gendarme stared hard at Marwan for a moment, but his face softened. “
Amour.
It is not always an easy thing.”

To Marwan’s surprise and relief, he zipped up the bag and waved him through.

15

The Skeleton had arrived.

That’s what Goddard and DuVall had dubbed Lemieux. He was all bones and no heart, they said, and he would be joining them any moment.

Goddard watched from the balcony of Ramsey’s flat as Lemieux’s jet helicopter landed at the public heliport below, and the rather tall and lanky fellow disembarked, got into the unmarked sedan Goddard had sent for him, and made the short drive to the front door. The heliport was less than a hundred meters from Sovereign Plaza, the luxury apartment complex that the Ramsey family (as well as one of the princesses of Monaco) occasionally called home.

The Ramseys owned four other homes besides this one, Goddard had learned since arriving. One was in Alexandria, on the southern shores of the Mediterranean, where Rafeeq had been raised. Another was a sumptuous urban town house in Maadi, an exclusive suburb of Cairo, not far from the corporate offices of Blue Nile Holdings. Yet another was a pricey ski chalet in Davos, Switzerland, which Rafeeq often lent out to clients, since he had long passed the age he could safely ski. And of course, there was their opulent forty-acre estate just outside of Paris—the city of Claudette’s birth—where they had spent most of their time recently.

Buying the flat in Monte Carlo had been Claudette’s idea, Goddard had gathered from their private cook, who had been in his guest quarters when the shooting began. Claudette was the ultimate socialite, he said, and desperately wanted a place 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 picture, then the clues begin to tell you a story, a vivid and violent and fascinating story. That’s what all the great detectives have done. They have closed their eyes and quieted their souls and let the narrative guide them.”

Goddard said nothing. Everything about this man repulsed him. Now he could add delusions of grandeur and a wont for pontification to the list.

The Skeleton was examining one of the tiny video surveillance cameras that Rafeeq Ramsey’s Paris-based security company had installed throughout the house and in the outer hallways six months earlier.

“We have all the surveillance recordings cued up and ready to go,” Goddard said before he was asked. “They’re all digital. They’re all time-stamped. And they captured everything. Ramsey and Marwan Accad talking at some length. Then Ramsey being shot. The death of the bodyguards. Accad taking their weapons. It’s all there. In fact, I just got the ballistics report back. The two bodies we found at the Méridien were killed with one of these weapons, undoubtedly by Accad.”

Lemieux stopped what he was doing and looked up.

Surprised by his interest, Goddard added, “The only problem is that while the surveillance tapes show us
what
happened, they don’t tell us
why
. There is no audio. No one but Marwan Accad knows what Monsieur Ramsey said in the final minutes of his life. But as I said on the phone, I’m hoping—as are you, I’m sure—that he can shed some light on this horrible crime.”

“So have you found him yet, Monsieur Goddard?” Lemieux asked.

“No, not yet,” Goddard conceded. “But we have a new lead.”

“Oh?”

“A taxi company just reported one of its cabs missing,” Goddard said. “The driver last reported in right outside the Méridien. Now no one can find him, and he’s not answering his radio. The manager of the Méridien claims to have seen him pull away, heading west, out of the city.”

“Toward France?” Lemieux asked.

“Apparently,” Goddard said. “I’m having my men check traffic cameras to see if we can identify the car and see where it went.”

One of the benefits of living in a high-tech age and in a city-state wealthy enough to afford state-of-the-art law enforcement technology was that surveillance cameras were positioned everywhere throughout Monte Carlo. A person could barely make a move without being photographed. The authorities couldn’t always stop a crime, but they could often reconstruct it and follow those responsible.

“How long ago did the Méridien manager see the taxi leave?” Lemieux asked.

“Over two hours ago,” Goddard said.

“And there’s been no sighting of Accad in the city?”

“No.”

“And no one’s spotted him at the airport in Nice?”

“No.”

“Cannes?”

“No.”

“Hyères?”

“No.”

Lemieux paced the room and then stopped suddenly and whipped around.

“He has to be heading for Marseille,” he said. “Get me the head of airport security—now!”

16

Royal Air Maroc flight 256 hurtled down the runway into the rainy blackness with 140 drowsy passengers on board, and Marwan Accad—aka Jack Cardell—was one of them.

As the jet banked south and began flying across the Mediterranean at twenty-five thousand feet and almost five hundred miles per hour, the flight attendants served some refreshments. When the pilot turned off the interior lights, most of those on board began to drift off to sleep. But try as he might, Marwan could not. The wound in his shoulder was almost unbearable. He was perspiring and felt feverish and nauseated. He asked one of the flight attendants for some pain relievers and washed them down with a Coke. Then he headed to the lavatory to wash his hands and face.

Once inside, he locked the door and stared at himself in the mirror. He looked as terrible as he felt. His face was pale. His eyes were red and watery. And as he peeled off his jean jacket, he found the shoulder of his T-shirt soaked in blood. It had soaked right through the paper towels he’d packed around the wound in the restroom at the Marseille airport when he changed clothes.

Marwan hung his jacket over the hook on the door, washed his hands with soap and warm water, and then carefully dabbed water on the paper towels on his shoulder until he could peel them off. It was a painful process and took longer than he had expected, and soon a flight attendant was knocking on the door.

“Sir,” she said, “is everything okay in there?”

“Yes, thank you,” Marwan replied.

“Are you sure?” she pressed.

“Yes, I’m fine. I’ll be out in a moment.”

“Please, sir, we will be landing soon. You need to return to your seat and fasten your seat belt.”

“Yes, yes,” he said. “I will be right there.”

The last thing Marwan wanted to do was cause a scene or attract attention to himself. As horrible as he felt, he hurried to wash the wound—wincing as he did—and redress it with new, moist paper towels. He splashed some water on his face, dried himself off, along with the sink and small counter, and stuffed all of his used paper towels into the trash. Marwan put his jacket back on, checked himself again to make sure there were no signs of blood on him, and then stepped out of the lavatory.

“Are you sure you’re okay?” the flight attendant asked as he reemerged.

“A bit of airsickness, I’m afraid,” he said, hoping that would seem normal enough for her to leave him alone.

“You really don’t look too good,” she said. “Would you like me to have a doctor waiting for you on the ground when we arrive?”

“That won’t be necessary,” he said as he began to perspire again. “My girlfriend will take care of me when I get there. But that’s very kind. Thank you.”

She let him go for now. But as Marwan returned to his seat and closed his eyes on the approach into Casablanca, his fears began to rise again. Yes, he was out of Marseille, out of Europe. But he was drawing far too much attention to himself. This woman would remember his face, his eyes, his demeanor. How soon until she was questioned?