To the guest who stated that "It would take all of about 10 seconds for Steve to be identified by picture or dna" I'd like to explain the following: a severe beating which continues over the course of a few days, especially one resulting in facial fractures and swelling, will change a person's look in such a manner that (s)he becomes absolutely unrecognizable. Trust me, I have researched this quite thoroughly.
Furthermore, not all hospitals will resort to DNA Fingerprinting when a 'John or Jane Doe' is admitted. It's simply too expensive. There are currently scores of unidentified people living out the remainder of their lives in nursing homes all over the USA. A DNA test usually is only administered the moment somebody comes to claim one of those people as a family member, as was the case with a particular John Doe in 2014.
Last but not least: up to this point in the story, both Five-0 and the HPD consider Steve McGarrett to be dead, so it's not all that far-fetched that - up to the point where 'Eleu Hekekia thinks he recognizes the tattoos - nobody has made any connection between a missing, presumably dead government official from the Honolulu area, and an unknown John Doe who turned up on a beach on the North Shore. Five-0 probably would have, but they don't know about the John Doe. Yet.
My apologies if all this seems inconceivable to you, but I have really tried to keep the situation as realistic as possible.

"A wise man proportions his belief to the evidence."

- David Hume -

6. EVIDENCE TO THE CONTRARY

"So what's your plan, if I may ask?" Levi takes a swig of the lukewarm warm coffee, grimaces and puts down the mug. Turning around, he looks at the man standing glued to the telescope. Danny has been very quiet, as if he uses all his energy to spin the gears of his mind, instead of the muscles of his mouth.

"Danny?"

Standing up, Danny stretches, popping his lower back. "Would you believe me if I told you I actually don't have a plan?" He throws another look out the window, then walks towards the dinghy couch and sits down. "All I know is that I need to stop Michael before, you know ..." He waves a hand through the air, glancing at Levi with an almost anguished look on his face.

Yeah, Levi knows what he means. Stop Michael from killing somebody else, stop him before he attacks another person close to Danny. "Did you think he would do this? I mean, it's been, what, ten, twelve years?" Levi watches Danny shake his head.

"No. In all honesty, I thought he would leave things alone. Thought he had, you know ... moved on." And Danny had truly believed that, had never expected this event from his past to come and haunt him in the present. Had never expected Steve, his partner, his friend to pay the price for that total cluster-fuck of years gone by.

Levi nods, understanding. "Guess the guy bears a real grudge."

Danny snorts. "This isn't 'bearing a grudge', Levi. Bearing a grudge makes you key the car of the asshole who rear-ended you in a traffic jam. This," he waves at the window, "this particular situation is just fucking insane!" An intense look ripples over Danny's face, causing his eyes to suddenly turn several shades darker than their normal light blue. Levi barely suppresses the shudder that runs through him; he thinks Danny knows exactly what level of insanity he's talking about.

"But why now, Danny? Why come after you, come after your friends after all this time?"

Looking up at Levi, Danny frowns. "I don't know. It's a question I've been asking myself ever since finding out that Michael was behind Steve's ..." He stops, hangs down his head, unable to say the words. Shaking his head, he gets up from the couch and moves back to the telescope.

"I'm planning to find out, though. Before I put an end to this."

He's just about to slip into the ICU cubicle to visit the John Doe, to pay his last respects as it were, when he nearly bumps into two people coming out. The female nurse throws him a friendly look as she asks him if she can help him with something, but the man standing next to her - and fuck his luck! - is somebody he knows.

Fortunately, it seems the man's memory is not as good as his own. Quickly gathering his wits, he looks at the number of the cubicle, then magically conjures a surprised look on his face. "Oh, shoot ... I guess I got the wrong room." He throws the nurse the bedazzling smile he knows works well, and watches her immediate response. "My bad. Sorry for disturbing you."

He jacks up his smile's radiance a few notches, sees the almost automatic answering smile on the nurse's face. The cop standing next to her though - oops, sorry; Detective, if you please - is as straight as they come and therefor not easily swayed by both his charm and good looks, and for a moment he thinks he's been made. A little frown appears on the HPD detective's face, then just as quickly disappears again, making room for a slightly quizzical look.

"Visiting somebody?"

He nods, taking care to steady his nerves. "Yeah, my brother. He was in a hunting accident yesterday, so I came in to see how he's doing." The nurse is still smiling when she points to the nursing station.

"Why don't you go over there and ask which room your brother is in? I'm sure they'll be able to help you."

Nodding, he half turns, then throws the couple another smile. "Will do. Thanks." He winks at the nurse, nods at the cop and heads over to the nursing station. When he's nearly there, he cautiously glances over his shoulder; the two people have disappeared around the corner, and he quickly opens the door to the stairwell, slipping through. The man in the ICU cubicle will have to wait.

It's not like he's going anywhere soon.

Hekekia stops, removing the hand with which he has steered Joyce Masters around the corner. "Sorry about that, but I wanted to get out of there as quickly as possible." Joyce throws him a surprised look.

"Something wrong, Detective?"

He nods. "Yeah. That guy back there? That's Kimo Jones, a well-known Jack-of-all-Trades in the criminal world." He rubs a finger between his eyes, trying to keep a budding headache at bay. "I arrested him several years ago for suspected gun trafficking. Kimo basically is one of the first ports of call for a wide variety of things, ranging from illegal guns and very young prostitutes to new identities and illegal betting."

Joyce lifts an eyebrow. "Sounds like the man has quite an enterprise. However, in my experience even criminals have siblings, and they do come over and visit them." Hekekia nods, then frowns as the headache decides to make a full front and center. Tension, he knows, which is the result of his sudden realization that he may have discovered something which Five-0 will be anxious to know. As a matter of fact, he was planning on calling them as soon as he left the ICU, but bumping into Jones threw a spanner in the works. He sighs, then pats Joyce on the shoulder.

"You're right, of course. However, I know for a fact Kimo Jones doesn't have a brother."

His cell phone shrills just as he's about to leave the apartment in order to catch a breath a fresh air so he can start revising his plans. Plans which Danny fucking Williams has not only caught onto, but is threatening to completely disrupt.

Looking at the display, he sighs in relief at the familiar number, then presses the Answer button. As usual, he remains silent until the man on the other end starts to talk.

"It's me. I ehm, I was planning on paying our friend a visit in hospital today, but when I got there he had visitors."

His years of being a cop have instilled a silent alarm which goes off whenever somebody lies or - like now - omits part of the truth. "Visitors?" The sharp tone of his voice leaves nothing to the imagination, and the other man catches on quickly, knowing he'd better tell the whole story.

"Yeah, ehm ... one of them was a cop. An HPD detective, to be more precisely."

Shit!

"What happened?"

The other man utters a short cough, then continues. "Nothing. I gave them a song and dance about visiting my brother, that I'd made a mistake with the room numbers. There was no trouble."

He sighs. "Well, there better not be, as I have plenty of trouble to handle here." He thinks back to the conversation he had with Danny Williams, remembers his menacing tone when he promised he would 'get him'. An involuntary chill runs down his spine, and for a moment he grits his teeth, furious at the audacity of the man, the way in which he has seemingly turned the table on him.

"What do you want me to do now?"

The voice of the other man hauls him back to the Here & Now, forcing him to focus. "What I want you to do? I expect you to honor your part of our deal."

He swallows bitterly at the way things have started to run out of control. However, there's no way he's going to back down, even though Danny Williams is hot on his heels. He'll still make the fucker pay!

"Just kill McGarrett."

Danny looks up as Levi comes walking into the apartment; he's been trawling the Internet, searching for clues as to why Michael has suddenly become hell bent on coming after him. Coming after his loved ones. Levi, meanwhile, has gone back to the precinct he works for, trying to find clues in the archive's files. He's wearing a worried look as he closes the door behind him.

"I take it you found something then?" Danny sits back in anticipation, not sure whether or not he'll like the information Levi has brought with him in the manila envelop tucked under his arm. He watches as Levi drops the envelope on the coffee table, then reaches out a hesitant hand.

"Yeah, I found something alright."

Danny's hand freezes at Levi's tone. "I'm not going to like this, am I?" He watches Levi's non-committal shrug, then sits back again, waiting for the other man to fill him in on the details.

"Over the last twelve years, Michael filed a total of TWENTY petitions with IA to re-open the case. They were all denied based on 'lack of evidence'; the last denial is dated four weeks ago." Levi scrutinizes Danny's face in order to judge his reaction. He sees a scala of emotions flow over Danny's features, and he can guess how painful it must be for him to hear this. The requests were denied due to lack of evidence, not because they were deemed 'without sound grounds'.

Levi leans forward, resting his arms on his knees. "What's more: his mother passed away just over three years ago, and ever since then Michael's father has co-signed the petitions. Looks like the mother was the one holding them back in this. I guess she believed your side of the story."

The sound coming from Danny's mouth is a cross between a bark of laughter and a moan of pain. "Believed? Nobody believed my story, Levi! They merely accepted it because they couldn't nail the thing on me!" He runs a shaking hand through his hair, bowing his head, trying to keep the rush of memories at bay. When he looks up again, he has steeled himself. As his hand goes to the manila envelop, he shoots a glance at Levi.

"OK, what else did you find?"

The warm air when he steps outside the hospital hits 'Eleu Hekekia like a blast from a shotgun, and he squints his eyes at the flash of pain searing through his head. Of all the times to get a headache, the current one even bordering on a migraine, this particular moment is not very opportune. He takes a small bottle out of his shirt pocket and dry-swallows two capsules, hoping they will provide relief.

When he sits down in his car, he takes out his cell phone, suppressing a feeling of excitement as he shifts through the stored images until he hits the ones he has made up at the ICU. Looking closely at one of the pictures, he is able to make out some details of the tattoo on the right shoulder of the John Doe; it looks like the head of a safety pin. Another picture shows a detail of the same shoulder, but a little higher up. It's part of an eye.

Shaking his head, almost unable to believe what he sees, he scrolls to another image, this one taken of the left shoulder. There, between the fading bruises, up high on the shoulder, he is able to make out a figure's head with what looks like a flame coming out of the top.

Sitting back, his mind a-whirl, he thinks back to the first time he has seen those particular tattoos, remembers how impressed he was with both the art work and the implied meaning of them. Those were not the kind of cheap imagery one decided on taking after a long night out of hitting the bars. Something which told him a lot about the character of the man wearing them.

Feeling unnerved both by the tattoos and the fact that he has bumped into Kimo Jones, a man not only known for supplying goods but with the reputation of not shirking from doing another man's dirty work, just as he was about to enter the man still registered as a John Doe in the ICU cubicle, realizing how massively important all this information is to Five-0, he decides to forgo calling them.

Instead, he'll go over and tell them in person.

"Guys, come and take a look at this." Chin waves a hand at Lou and Kono, sitting at the conference table. They're sorting through the papers sent to them from the mainland, files which they hope will shed some light on the person who is out gunning for Danny. Kono comes to lean against Chin's side while Lou stands next to him.

"What did you find, Chin?" Lou looks over his shoulder, trying to catch a glimpse of whatever it is his colleague finds so interesting. Chin taps on the screen, then moves an enlarged portion of the open file to one of the smaller screens.

"Here, take a look at this. Somebody has been trying to get IA to reopen the case on Jacob Miller for the past ten years or so." He points at a series of entries, the first one dating back to less than a month after Miller's death, the last one just under two months ago. "Unfortunately," Chin continues, "the name of the petitioner has been blacked out."

Lou takes a closer look at the file. "Seems that there were actually two petitioners the last few years." He points to the extra line blacked out on the last series of requests. "Any chance of getting the names from IA?"

Chin shakes his head. "I doubt it. If Danny were to ask, they might release them, as he is personally involved. Unfortunately, we're not."

Both men look up as Kono utters a soft expletive, then walks over to the conference table and slams her hand down on it. "This is all poho!" She gestures at the files on the table, then points at the screen. "A waste of time, all of it! Nothing is getting us closer to finding out where Danny is, or finding out who is after him, or who killed ..." Abruptly stopping, she sinks down on one of the chairs, tears slowly coursing down her face.

"St ... Steve is dead, and we don't even know w... why, or where his bo ... body is. This all sucks!"

Chin quickly walks up to his younger cousin, wraps his arms around her as she really starts to cry. Lou watches the couple, swallowing the lump that has suddenly appeared in his throat. He understands the young woman's frustration at not being able to properly deal with the grief they're all feeling.

Steve's dead, Danny's gone, and they don't have a clue as to who or why.

Whether it's the sudden transition from the air-conditioned hospital out into the heat of the afternoon, or the excitement about his discovery, but the headache 'Eleu Hekekia has been trying to keep at bay decides to become a migraine, painkillers notwithstanding. His vision suddenly starts swimming, which is why he doesn't see the light turning red, or the truck which suddenly swerves into the path of his car.

All he knows is that he suddenly feels as if he's lifted into the air, then tumbling over and over, breath momentarily cut off by the activated airbag pushed against his face. When the movement stops, there are several seconds of absolute, almost peaceful quiet.

The next moment his head feels like it's exploding, and for just an instant the world becomes a monochrome gray before he blacks out.