Unknown Victim by Kay Hadashi (classic books for 11 year olds .TXT) 📕

“Right.”

“Even though you’re being a pain in the butt running your own investigation, you have good ideas. I had a CSI tech collect a tube of blood from Jon-Jon and compare it to what we found on the dead man’s knife. No match. Sorry.”

“Rats,” Gina mumbled. “Wait a minute…”

“To answer that question, yes, the blood on the knife was human, and from a male. Not from your pet cat or rats, mongooses, or any other little beasts hanging around the estate.”

“It was a thought.”

“Okay, that’s the official lecture,” Kona said. “Now that that’s out of the way, tell me what you have on the dead man.”

Gina was surprised by his request and wondered if there was a ploy behind it. “You want to know what I’ve found?”

“Unofficially, you’re a trained professional and you’ve been investigating. From what I’ve heard, you’re a step ahead of me.”

“I’m a professional landscaper and horticulturist, a lawnmower as my family puts it.”

Detective Kona nodded in the direction of the yellow pad. “Are you going to share with me what you’ve found or not?”

Gina got her pad of notes and assembled her various Venn diagrams at the top.

“Don’t laugh.”

“You’ve worked hard on this.” Kona sorted through the pages and sheets until he got to her list of evidence. “Were you planning on coming to me with any of this?”

“Please understand it all started with simply wanting to know who the guy was, that’s it.”

“Did you find out?”

“Danny, or maybe Danny boy. That’s what the stoned guy told me before he passed out.”

He looked up from the notes. “You’re sure he said Danny?”

“Danny boy, but I wasn’t sure if he said that because he recognized the face or if he was simply high and his mind was making things up. Why?”

“There used to be a pimp known as Danny boy that worked the Kapalama area.”

“Used to be?” Gina asked.

“We picked him up after a particularly bad night a year or so ago. A couple of his girls got roughed up pretty bad. Because of that, there’d been two shootings in Kapalama that night, leaving one dead. When we picked him up a few days later, he still had the gun. Bad move on his part, because that was the only solid evidence we had on him. Got a life sentence out of it.”

“If he’s in prison, who’s the guy that I found on my porch?”

“Could actually be Danny.”

“I don’t understand,” Gina said.

“The guy we sent away got shivved not long after he got to prison. When the warden tried to figure out who did it, several inmates said he wasn’t the real Danny boy. He looked like him, but he had a small scar on his cheek that the real Danny didn’t.”

“But what about fingerprints?” Gina asked. “The police didn’t get a positive ID during booking after the original crime?”

“We took his prints, but neither he nor the real Danny had ever been printed before. We had nothing to compare to. The fingerprints from guy who was shivved in prison were the ones we entered into the database as Danny.”

“What was his last name?” Gina asked, finally getting an answer to that question.

“He refused to give it, so he was tried and convicted as Danny Doe.”

And her frustration continued.

“You had no one that could identify him in a lineup? None of his girls from his days as a pimp?”

“After his body was transferred to the county morgue, we brought in a few of his old girls. They refused to look at him, except one. She was still just a kid, and was shaking in her shoes during a lineup. All we got out of her was a shake of her head. The investigator barely noticed, and the ADA wasn’t present at the time. When the investigator pressed for a verbal answer, the girl clammed up. As you know, we need a verbal commitment from a witness, not just a nod or shake of the head.”

“That’s pretty typical of hookers, isn’t it?” Gina asked.

“Very. They clam up tight as soon as police come around. Their lives are tough, and they know who protects them. They’re going to do nothing to screw that up.”

“Let me see if I got this right. A known pimp named Danny boy had a couple of his girls roughed up one night, and went after the dudes that did it in revenge? When he ended up killing one of them, he was arrested a few days later with the gun still in his possession. He was convicted of murder and sent away, where he was stabbed to death by another inmate. But the inmates said the guy that got stabbed in prison wasn’t actually Danny, but someone else that looked a little like him. The only one of his girls that had been willing to look at the body shook her head that it wasn’t Danny’s body, but the investigator couldn’t get a verbal affirmation from her. Right?”

“Right,” he said.

“Pretty shady ADA, to go after a guy that couldn’t be identified. What was the evidence?”

“His prints on the gun, and on the shell casing that had been found at the scene. He had no alibi for his where-abouts during the time of the crime. He got five to ten for manslaughter, since he’d been defending himself at the time. He’d been lucky enough to get knifed before he shot back. He would’ve been out in a couple of years for good behavior.”

“If he hadn’t been shanked first,” Gina said. “It sounds like he took a fall for the real Danny boy. Go do some dirty work for his friend the pimp, and when real trouble found him, he took the blame and went to prison, thinking he’d be out in a couple of years.”

“That’s what the investigator always thought.”

“Some investigator, to allow something like that to go to court without positively ID’ing the perp on trial.”

“I was that investigator, Miss Santoro.”

“Oh. Sorry.”

“Don’t worry about it. That’s been bothering