The Wind Is Rising 1

by Daniel Steele

  “He instructed the courier who delivered the photo that killed Bell as surely as a bullet through the heart to drop the photo untouched in the trash on the next floor down. He could have told the guy to rip it into shreds, or drop it in the trash outside the hospital. But, he wanted us to find it. To know how he did it. Why he did it.”

  I stared into her eyes, studied her face. There’s a theory that our emotions eventually transform our faces. People that are happy, at peace with their lives, tend to have faces that reflect that. And people whose lives have been marked by painful emotions, such as rage and fear and hatred, eventually are marked by it. She couldn’t have been a hag her entire life. She had convinced at least one man to lie with her and impregnate her. She had to have been a girl once, must have laughed, must have flirted.

  But for the life of me, I couldn’t see it.

  “And then there’s the coincidence of your presence here today. Just by sitting in your doctor’s office while Bell was being murdered, you were giving the law enforcement establishment and myself in particular, the finger.”

  “People do go to the doctor.”

  And I knew there was a smile she was fighting to keep off her face.

  “That’s true. What’s more unusual is for a patient to call their cardiologist with only three days advance notice and insist on coming in for a checkup that wasn’t due for three months. To become so much of a pain in the ass that the office manager eventually relented and said if you showed up and were willing to wait, they would try to work you in if an opening occurred. They told you it probably wouldn’t happen and that you might wind up wasting an entire day in the waiting room, but you insisted on coming in – today.”

  “I had my reasons.”

  “I’m sure you did, or at least you can give plausible ones. Doesn’t matter.”

  I stood up and looked down at her petite frame. She could have been anyone’s sainted mother or grandmother if you didn’t look into her eyes.

  “Doesn’t matter because it worked. Bell is dead and that will hurt our case. We know you and your son killed him but you’ll probably get away with it. And there is the other person Billy killed a few days after he slaughtered your daughter-in-law and grandson. We don’t have that nailed down, but we do have some good leads. I think he’ll eventually wind up fighting two first degree murder charges.

  “But even that doesn’t matter, Mrs. Sutton. I know mothers love their sons –even twisted monsters like your son. I know you bore him in your body. I know you could have had William by artificial insemination, but you probably had a son with a man you loved or at least lusted after. I know you’ve been his champion, been the one person on earth that has always had his back.”

  I stared into those dark eyes that had witnessed terrible things and was still able to love William Sutton.

  “That’s why I want you to know this. More than William himself, I want YOU to know. Sutton is a monster. He’s killed women - his own wife, children – his own son, an old man and some stranger. I could wait. If he got off this time, he would kill again. Because somebody would enrage him, or get in his way. I could wait.

  “But I won’t. He will die in Raiford for what he’s already done. I don’t care how impossible the odds are, I don’t care what I have to do. I don’t care about the Angel of Death crap. I promise you, as a man, that I will put him into the Death Chamber.

  “He will die a thousand times before they pump those chemicals into his veins that will stop his heart. And his dying will hurt like hell. Don’t believe that bullshit about death by lethal injection being painless. There have been at least two men that they began the process with and had to stop. I interviewed both of them before they died. And they told me it was like having liquid fire injected into your veins. They said it felt like fire ants crawling through your arms and into your chest. And the one that came the closest - he only lived three days and died in the prison infirmary - he said it was like drowning in fire.”

  I stepped back. The almost-smile had vanished.

  “It doesn’t matter what you do. Doesn’t matter how good the attorneys you hire and throw at me are. Doesn’t matter if you’ve got the most deadly sheriff that can be bought running interference for you. But don’t let me dampen your hopes, Mrs. Sutton. I don’t want you to despair. I want you to keep hoping until the last moment. I told you before, I hope you live a long life. I want you to live long enough to see him rot on Death Row. And die.”

  We locked stares but she didn’t break.

  “It must be comforting to have such a high opinion of yourself, Mr. Maitland. You need to stop reading your newspaper clippings. You are going to lose. My son will walk free.”

  “One of us is going to turn out to be wrong. If I’m wrong, William will walk free, but that’s only a matter of time. He’s a sociopath and he’ll kill or rape somebody else. And he’ll never be lucky enough to commit a crime so perfect again. “

  “But, if you’re wrong, he’s going to be stuck in a cage with murderers and rapists who love good looking men and monsters that will kill you for a pack of cigarettes. He’s going to be stuck in a jungle where no one can guarantee his safety, not the prison authorities or any bodyguards you hire for him inside. I’d hate it, but he might not make it to the death chamber.”

  I turned my back on her and walked to the doorway.

  “You’re free to go, Mrs. Sutton. Go and enjoy the fresh air that Wilbur Bell never will again. And enjoy your son’s company- for as long as you can.”

  I took the elevator down to the first floor and walked past the big patient relations desk down a hallway to a non-descript door marked, “Hospital Personal Only.” You would never have guessed that a morgue with dead bodies lay behind it. And that was the point. People walked by here a thousand times a day without realizing this was the Realm Of The Dead. White, sterile lights illuminated a desk behind which a lanky individual in hospital scrubs was sitting pecking at a desktop computer. There was an opening to a back room to the left.

  He stood up quickly and stepped in front of me into the opening.

  “Sorry, only authorized hospital personnel allowed in here. No members of the public.”

  I showed him my SA ID and said, “Wilbur Bell. A witness in one of our cases died today. I’d like to see him.”

  He led me to a gurney at the back of the room. The room was cold. The metal of the gurney as I gripped it was chilled. The morgue attendant pulled back the white sheet. They had already cut him open for the autopsy and while they had made an effort to put him back together again, it was nothing like the job that a mortician would do. It looked like a body, not like the man I had spent an hour talking with in the afternoon sunlight.

  “Could I have a moment?”

  When he’d walked away I looked down at the corpse that had been Wilbur Bell. It looked like a wax figurine of a man. I tried not to think of the thoughts that must have run through his mind in the moments while he was dying. That must have been the worst. The helplessness. A dying man has been taken out of the game. There’s nothing more he can do for the people he loved. All you can do is helplessly go down into the darkness.

  “I’m sorry, Wilbur. I wish we could have done a better job in protecting you. I’m sorry you gave up your last months for this case. All I can do is promise you I’ll do my best to make sure your sacrifice was worth it. And, as much as I can, provide protection for your granddaughter and her baby.”

  I remembered our talk by the river.

  “But, you had a good run. Godspeed.”

  I walked to the front of the hospital and the circular drive. The police presence had disappeared. There wasn’t anyone in uniform and the evidence techs had packed up and left. The sun had vanished and full night enveloped the hospital. A cold wind blew in off the river. I pulled my coat around me. The temperature had probably dropped into the 40s since I had walked into the hospital. But it felt good.

  My Escalade was in the parking garage. Instead of turning to
the left, I turned to the right and crossed the few feet to the river railing. I leaned over the railing. Wind whipped rain peppered me.

  “Feels like a storm’s coming.”

  I turned to see Bill Franklin in the darkness standing beside me.

  “I’ve got a bodyguard now?”

  “They say that the last stage in egomania comes when you think everything that happens revolves around you.”

  But he smiled.

  “I won’t deny that I’m almost there, Franklin, but I couldn’t see any reason why you’d be here after the rest of the department is gone.”

  He looked out to the river. I could see whitecaps from the stiff breeze that ruffled his pale brown longish hair.

  “No real place to go, Maitland. My shift is over. They’ve got other detectives handling the paperwork. Nobody home. Besides, I like the river. Sometimes I think it’s the only reason I’ve stayed this long.”

  “I know what you mean.”

  In the distance, in the direction of the coast, a deeper darkness against the night sky was lit by internal fires. Before too many hours those flares would become lightning and the cold drops would become a November storm.

  “I’d say it will blow in in a couple of hours, and it will be in the 30s by tomorrow morning.”

  “You sound like the proper meteorologist.”

  “Just somebody who’s lived here most of his life. I’ve felt these storms coming for 30 years. You can smell it in the wind. You can feel it. The buildup of that energy creates electricity that you can smell.

  “When I was a kid and caught outside with some friends, we looked at each other and saw our hair writhing and rising on our heads. I’m lucky to be standing here. People told us afterwards that out in the flat open ground the way we were, we should have been hit by lightning. But for some reason, nothing happened.”

  “Wasn’t your time, Maitland. I’m a big believer in fate. Personally, I love the storms. The world never feels as alive as it does just before a big one hits. It feels like anything can happen.”

  We stood there silently watching the storm approach.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE: AND THE STORM IS COMING

  November 16, 2005

  Tuesday, 8 P.M.

  Nachi, Cocom Beach, Cozumel, Mexico

  He stepped over the body near the crystal coffee table. It had been worth a considerable amount of money before bullets shattered the piece of artwork into several large pieces and a million slivers. He found the fat, naked man, bleeding from a dozen wounds. He had fallen near the rail of the balcony looking out over the waters of the Caribbean. He had been trying to climb over and drop the dozen feet to the white sand of Nachi Cocom Beach.

  For an instant, Frank thought the fat man had bought it, but with a groan he reached up and gripped the top of the railing and heaved, trying to pull his body up. Frank placed the Ruger he’d turned to when the Sig Sauer was emptied flush against fat man’s back and pulled the trigger – once, twice and a third time. The fat man jerked with each bullet and his hand finally released his hold on the railing.

  To be sure, he aimed from three inches away at the back of the fat man’s head. Two bullets to the brain should make sure he wouldn’t come back to life.

  A hammer blow to his back drove him forward and into the metal railing. He dropped the Ruger and was barely able to hold on and keep from pitching over to the sand below. He turned and saw one of the security men who had fallen behind the couch peering around the corner, trying to steady one shaking hand holding a Steyr Semi-Automatic rifle against the arm of the couch.

  His back hurt like hell, it hurt to breath, and he knew there’d be one hell of a bruise, but it was better than the hole the bullet would have made in his unprotected back. He slipped to one side picking up his Ruger at the same time. As he slid down and to his left, a bullet clanged off the metal of the railing.

  Frank looked at the bodyguard, a young, longhaired type. Blood ran down the bodyguard’s arm. Frank knew he’d put at least three bullets into his body and the young man’s face was covered with blood from what he had thought was a brain shot but apparently only creased his skull. Head shots always looked worse than they actually were, unless there were brains lying around.

  As he prepared to fire, he saw the kid pulling the trigger of the Steyr back and he didn’t look forward to shooting it out with a Steyr. In that second, he felt a grudging admiration for the kid. He could have tried to crawl out in the chaos while Frank and his friends were cleaning up, but he had stayed at his post. Like a good soldier.

  Throwing himself behind a plush chair, he felt it quiver as two and then a third bullet thudded into the fabric. Good construction he thought as he hurled himself to his feet and lunged to the left. They had stopped high powered rounds. There must be metal under the fabric.

  The bodyguard was trying to swing the Steyr around when Frank reached him and kicked it away. It flew across the room. The kick dislodged the young man’s arm from the couch and he fell backwards to lie on the plush silver rug that covered the entire room. Frank looked down at him and saw that he was all in. He wasn’t going to get up again.

  The bodyguard had closed his eyes and breathed heavily, then opened them for a moment. Frank had seen the look before. He wasn’t any kind of a writer and he didn’t think he could ever find the words to describe it. But he knew it, and he knew what the man on the floor was thinking.

  “Close your eyes, kid.”

  Then:

  “Cierra los ojos, chico.”

  The bodyguard’s body jerked as Frank put two bullets squarely between his closed eyes.

  He swung around to his right as the door to another wing of the super-condo opened and a shorter, balding man stepped out proceeded by an Armalite semi-automatic rifle.

  He peeked out.

  “Everything okay out here.”

  “No thanks to you, Bulldog.”

  “I was busy. I heard the shots. I’ve got one last room to go and then we need to call pickup. This place is isolated, but the fuzz is going to show up sooner or later.”

  “Everything’s in hand. Finish it.”

  There were four men and two women in the combination den and game room complete with a wall of video machines, two hot tubs and another wet bar. He went through the room methodically putting two bullets into each target’s head. People had a habit of surviving even seeming terrible fatal body wounds. But two bullets into the brain was pretty reliable.

  He heard something from the wing of bedrooms where Bulldog had vanished. There was a short scream. Then another. Then shots. Then two more. And two more.

  There had been something different about the screams. When he gave Bulldog a glance on his return, the shorter man shrugged, “Two girls. Ten or eleven. They were hiding in one of the closets. They were the last.”

  Frank walked back to the railing. They were on the most isolated part of the beach, in the biggest and most expensive condo on the island. It was dark and quiet, the way it was supposed to be.

  “I hate jobs with fucking kids.”

  Bulldog shrugged again.

  “You would want Wilson to get his hands on them?”

  “No.”

  “We didn’t have a choice Frank. You know how the contract reads. Nobody gets out alive. And I don’t want people like us coming after us.”

  After a moment, Frank said, “Call for pickup.”

  Bulldog nodded and said, “Okay. I’ll find Wilson and the others. We’ll get photos to confirm the kills, pick up anything we might have touched, and get out of here. It shouldn’t take us more than 15 minutes. I figure we might have that long before Mexican cops show up. And I don’t want to have to shoot our way out.”

  When he had left, Frank leaned over the railing. Drops hit his face. Looking to the left, he saw lightning flickering in the night up the curve of the island. The wind was starting to pick up, driving the rain before it. There was a storm coming.

  He took a deep breath, pulling in the
smell and feel of the coming storm.

  He loved storms. Nothing ever changes, but in this moment it felt like everything might.

  COMING: WHEN WE WERE MARRIED-

  VOLUME 3 – THE WIND IS RISING, PART 2

  AUTHOR’S NOTE: CHARACTERS

  This is a complex story with a lot of characters. Here’s a list of most of the important characters.

  William Maitland

  The 42-year-old Chief or 1st Assistant State Attorney for the Third Judicial Circuit in Northeast Florida in Jacksonville who becomes “The Angel of Death.” His life falls apart at the beginning of the novel and the question is whether he can ever put it back together again.

  Debbie Maitland-Bascomb

  William Maitland’s 39-year-old wife and formerly Associate Professor of Business at the University of North Florida in Jacksonville. She is now Administrator of the Jacksonville Public Defenders Office and Maitland’s ex. She finds herself having as much trouble adjusting to a single life as her ex.

  Kelly Maitland

  The Maitland’s daughter who is 17 at the start of the novel. Kelly is almost a carbon copy of her mother. She has an army of would-be boyfriends until she decides she wants to steal her mother’s boyfriend away from her.

  BJ Maitland

  The Maitland’s son who is a rebellious 14-year-old at the start of the novel. He’s grown estranged from a father he seldom sees and who acts as a damper on ANY fun a 14-year-old might want to have. But he’s not crazy about his mother’s new boyfriend either.

  Doug Baker

  The 28-year-old Associate Professor of Business at UNF who broke up the marriage of Bill and Debbie Maitland and later left for another academic post in Chicago, asking Debbie to go with him. He’d even take her brats. But he goes alone.