Hunting Death

Chapter 12

Frustrated and tired as hell, Damien walked into the ADA's office, hoping Jaci would be in a good mood and willing to go to bat for him. His luck fell short as of late but hopefully with another name to add to the ever-expanding list, she'd finally be able to pull a damn rabbit out of her hat. Everyone called Jaci a magician in the courtroom after all.

"Jaci!" He exclaimed with exaggerated enthusiasm.

Jaci, however, wasn't buying it. She'd barely glanced in his direction, taking a sip of her coffee and flipping the next page of whatever magazine she pretended to be reading. Things looked pretty slow these days, besides arraigning that psycho child killer this morning, Jaci didn't get much action.

A shame, especially since Jaci had always been particularly nice to look at with her long legs and creamy mocha colored skin, but she acted like a real she-wolf in the courtroom. She tore the defense and their witnesses to pieces faster than a Tasmanian Devil. You never wanted to get on Jaci's bad side.

"What can I do for you, Crow?" She asked absently, flipping another page.

"Oh, nothing much. Just wondering if you might be able to get me a warrant, that's all."

He piqued her interest. Glancing up, her hazel eyes flickered with mischief. "Oh?" She asked. "And what might you need a warrant for?"

Damien grimaced, as fast as he'd gotten her attention, he would likely lose it. "The Melton place."

With a sigh, Jaci dropped her head, her eyes landing back on the magazine.

"Oh, come on, Jaci, I only need a warrant, that's it. There's been another victim, you can't keep ignoring this!"

"Another victim you say?" Her tone flat, disinterested, she didn't even bother looking at him. "If this victim is anything like the last three, I'm sorry Damien, I can't help you."

Damien wanted to pound his head against a wall, he kept getting nowhere with this case, and the one thing that might help him tie Keith to it all, a warrant to search the property, seemed no closer to being signed.

"Four victims! Four!" He shouted at Jaci, who, while appearing bored, at least looked at him this time. It annoyed the hell out of him, trying to talk to her when she ignored him. "Four women, Jaci, and all four say they'd been out on a date with this Walker guy before waking up two days later with no memory of the past forty-eight hours. That can't be a coincidence!"

"I agree with you Damien, but it doesn't change the fact that I can't get you a warrant for the Melton place. We've been through this more times than I'd care to count, there are five sitting judges at the courthouse, and they all happened to be besties with Robert Melton. Is your memory so short that you don't remember what happened the first time I tried this?"

Damien grumbled, no, he had a perfectly good memory. It simply pissed him off that women continued to be attacked and he'd been helpless to stop it, especially considering Keith Walker remained virtually untouchable barring some major piece of evidence linking him to one of the women.

At first glance, it looked like your typical date rape case, but the deeper he dug, the weirder things got.

Because they didn't have any evidence. They dusted each woman's house for fingerprints, but never found Keith's among them. They found no DNA, no fluids, no hairs, no fibers, hell, even without getting the test results back for the last two rape kits, preliminary tests showed no signs of sexual assault at all. Virtually nothing to go on!

No drugs or alcohol in their systems, though, to be fair, forty-eight hours provided more than enough time for whatever, if anything, in their systems to disappear, but it didn't make it any less strange. These women all reported two days of lost time after going on a date with Keith. Two days where they remembered nothing before waking up in their own beds, in their own clothes.