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half-open, and something inside was glistening in the afternoon light. Joanna reached for a tongue blade and raised the upper lip. The man’s front teeth were made of a silvery metal.
    Joanna stepped back and examined the body once more. It was dusted with soil from his slide down the slope, but there was no dirt on his face. “Did someone clean his face?”
    “Yeah,” Jake answered. “We wanted to take Polaroids and show them around to see if anybody could ID him.”
    Joanna reached down with her tongue blade and scraped off loose dirt from the tattooed area on the forearm. There was no writing or names associated with the large cross. “I’m surprised the rain last night didn’t cake mud all over him.”
    “We got lucky there,” Jake said. “It only drizzled in Santa Monica last night.”
    Joanna nodded to herself. That explained why the blood and blood clots near the plywood fence hadn’t washed away. It also explained why the empty shoe box was dry and hadn’t lost its faint, disagreeable odor. What was that smell?
    Jake broke into her thoughts. “Well, what do you think?”
    “There are a few things of interest,” Joanna said, going back to the corpse’s shoes to make certain there was no green paint on the soles.
    “Ah-huh,” Jake said, taking out a ballpoint pen and notepad. He wondered why the corpse’s shoes were so interesting to Joanna.
    “To begin with, he’s not an addict. He’s not emaciated, did a fair amount of heavy labor, and has his shirtsleeves rolled up, which tells us he wasn’t trying to hide any track marks.”
    Jake glanced down at the man’s hands and the calluses and split nails. “What kind of work you figure he did?”
    Joanna shrugged. “Carpenter, plumber, handyman, construction worker. Any one of a dozen occupations.”
    “Is there any way to narrow it down?”
    “Not out here,” Joanna said, thinking about the tests that needed to be done in a forensic laboratory. For starters, analysis of the calluses might yield some material that pointed to a particular occupation. Components of fertilizer, for example, would indicate that the man was a gardener or perhaps worked in a factory that made fertilizer.
    “Can you tell if he’s from around here?” Jake asked.
    “No,” Joanna replied. “But I can tell you he wasn’t born or raised here.”
    Jake squinted an eye. “How do you know that?”
    “His teeth.” Joanna leaned over and pried up the corpse’s top lip with a tongue blade. “Using metal to replace teeth is kind of archaic, but it’s how dentistry is practiced in Russia and in some parts of Eastern Europe. That’s where this fellow is from.”
    Jake nodded. “That fits with his tattoo.”
    Joanna’s gaze went to the tattoo. It was a large, dark blue cross with orange borders. “You think that tattoo is Russian?”
    “I think the cross is Russian Orthodox, and that’s a religion practiced mainly in Russia and the countries around it.” Jake pointed at the ornate details of the cross with his pen. “See the fancy whirls and swirls, particularly at the ends of the cross?”
    “Pretty fair artwork,” Joanna commented.
    Jake tilted his hand back and forth. “So-so. The color is uneven and the symmetry is not all that good.”
    Joanna smiled over at him. Jake was an expert on tattoos. He loved them. They were the perfect identification mark. Perpetrators never bothered to hide them, and victims always remembered them.
    “So,” Jake concluded, straightening back up, “we’ve got a Russian or Eastern European immigrant who does heavy labor. He walks down this street—for what, only God knows—and gets his head blown off.”
    “He came down this street to kick a hole in the fence, Jake.”
    “What!”
    “Look at the toes of his shoes, particularly the one on the right.”
    Jake saw the green discoloration on the toe of the right shoe. On closer inspection he detected small green splinters stuck between the sole and the upper part of the