Hunting Death

Chapter 10

Damien woke up that morning to the loud, annoying shrill of his cell phone. He wasn't due at the station for another couple of hours, and after the night he'd experienced, all he wanted was a few extra hours of sleep. No such luck.

"Crowley." He said into the phone, his voice harsh, his tone sharp.

"Damien? Hey, it's Julie, I'm at work, and I'm sorry to be calling you so early, I should have just called this into the station, but, well, I figured you'd want to hear it first."

Damien grumbled, rolling out of bed and grabbing his shorts off the floor. Nearly falling over as he tried putting them on in the dark, he stumbled to the window and tore the blinds open, sunlight streaming in and nearly blinding him. The phone wedged between his shoulder and his ear, he finally managed to get his legs into the right holes.

"Is she still there?" He asked gruffly. Needing no further explanation.

"Yes," Julie replied.

"I'm on my way."

Damien picked up a pair of slacks that were tossed carelessly over the arm of a chair, and after sniffing them, slipped them on, heading to his closet to finish getting dressed. One of the best parts of being a detective was not having to wear a uniform. One of the worst was the hours. Some nights, like last night, he feared he'd never get to go home.

After spending what amounted to an eternity at the scene of a grisly crime, the murder and sexual assault of a child, all he visualized was sleeping for the next several weeks. It really wore on him at times. Like this latest string of cases.

There wasn't a lot of crime in the land of the Amish. Certainly not like there was in a bigger city, like, say, New York, where his family was from, and most of them still worked for the NYPD, but Damien found that he enjoyed the slower pace. Lancaster PD wasn't as big an outfit as some of their neighbors, he was one of only four detectives, and caught most of the sexually related offenses himself.

Like a one-man special victims unit. Some days were slow, and others seemed to last forever. It turned out to be the stepfather who killed the poor girl last night, a pretty open and shut case actually, but Damien was nothing if not thorough, and he stayed behind at the scene to make sure it was processed correctly. He wasn't about to let the sick son of a bitch walk because some rookie crime scene tech fucked up.

Dressed in yesterday's pants, and a slightly wrinkled button up shirt, Damien grabbed a protein bar and a cold coffee out of the fridge and slid behind the wheel of his pickup truck. It wasn't department issued, but they didn't have the money offhand to replace the patrol car he'd smashed up a few months back during a high-speed pursuit, so they agreed to let him drive his own truck, picking up the tab for the insurance and maintenance on it.

Which suited Damien just fine. He liked his truck, it was clean and reliable. And it was his, he didn't have to share it with anyone else at the department.

After putting in a call to his captain, filling him in on what little details he gathered during the brief conversation with Julie, a nurse at Lancaster General, that he'd been seeing off and on for the last few months, he made the short drive to the hospital. His mind already racing as he imagined what he might find, what condition the girl might be in.

Over the last six months, he'd caught three cases of sexually related assaults that, while certainly seemed sexual in nature, were anything but textbook. And while he had a prime suspect in mind, he was having one hell of a hard time nailing the son of a bitch.

A quick stop at the front desk and Damien was led back to one of the nurse's stations, where he found Julie nervously pacing behind the desk.

"Oh thank God, there you are!" She sputtered, crossing to him and going directly into his arms.