janey did not get much interest or encouragement from her fellow humans, including her mom or her teachers or her guidance counselor, in her desire to be a true crime author.
but she was not to be deterred. through high school, she worked after school and on weekends at the local supermarket, and she saved almost all the money she made. she intended to use the money to investigate one or more crimes during the summer after she graduated. she knew she could not research and write a book in that period, but it would give her a start. then she would return and begin full time employment at the supermarket.
mr perkins, the manager of the supermarket and a true crime fan himself. was amused by janey’s ambition, and was the one person in the world who encouraged her.
janey persuaded her mom to give her her old car when her mom got a new one. the old one had no value except as scrap, and her mom warned her that it might break down totally at any time, but janey decided to take the chance rather than use up her money buying a used one herself - which could be a complete lemon anyway, or leave herself at the mercy of buses. how could anybody investigate a crime taking buses? besides, she had never been on a bus in her life, except a school bus, and just did not like the thought of them.
as for investigating the crimes, she resolved to use the technique she understood, from reading her books, to be annette walker davis’s. just appear at police stations, and they would either help her out or they would not. she would take it from there.
meanwhile, she went on line night after night, looking for promising cases. ones that had not already been done by some other true crime writer, famous or otherwise, but that might make interesting reading and that she might have some chance of success in.
one case in particular intrigued her. a career public defender named hester johnson had been murdered, in broad daylight, in a public park on the afternoon of her last scheduled day on the job. the park was located across the street from the county jail where she had been interviewing, and bidding farewell to, her last clients. the case had never been solved, and no one had ever been arrested, despite the overwhelmingly large list of possible subjects - the hundreds of men, and dozens of women, that she had not very successfully defended during her thirty years on the job.
although the crime had taken place ten years earlier, and in a city and state two thousand miles from where janey had lived her whole life, she thought it was a promising one. surely with so many suspects, she could come up with somethimg.
and janey already had a good title - “in broad daylight”.
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