"You don't look anything like him. Do the tattoos ring a bell?"

"Of course not. It's nothing but crosses."

Diaz glanced at Beckett.

"Does he have more on his back?"

"Uh-uh. It's all in front where he could reach. None of his ink is identifying-like the name of a ship, or a gang sign, or something like that-it's just what you see."

Diaz frowned at the body, then shook her head.

"Okay, I want you to check him for sex. If you get a smear, log it for DNA."

"Pardy already told me."

"Fine. Dope, too. He was in that alley for something."

Beckett shifted the bag to make a note, and the bag gave me an idea.

"Did you see if his name was in his clothes?"

Beckett grinned.

"Always, and inside his shoes, too. I got burned like that on my first case-here's this dude, flattened with no ID and no prints in the file, turns out his mama wrote his name inside his belt, and that's how we made the ID."

I nodded, and looked back at Diaz.

"And you didn't find any rings, watches, a wallet-"

"He was stripped, Cole. Just the clippings and seven cents."

I studied the body again, feeling remote and detached. His chest was smooth and thin beneath the tattoos, with a farmer's tan showing pale flesh against dark arms. Other than a thin scrape at the base of his neck, no other marks were apparent. The lower half of his body showed a mottled lividity where his blood settled; the bloodless tissue above had taken on a waxy sheen that seemed to highlight the tattoos. The pucker of the entry hole was purple and blue with a pepper of gunpowder particulate surrounding it. He had been shot close, the muzzle not more than two feet away. His fingers showed no evidence of rings, but his left wrist carried the pale outline of a missing watch. A faint dimple crossed the outside of his hip below his left pelvis, so slight it might have been a fold or a crease.

I said, "What's that?"

Beckett reached under the gurney for the case file, and tipped out a large X-ray.

"A surgical scar. There's another on his opposite leg just like it. Here, we already got the plates."

He held the X-ray up to the overhead light. The shadows and smudges of the pelvic ball joint were offset by perfect white bars that ran along the outside of each femur. Beckett pointed them out.

"It looks corrective, so he probably had the surgery when he was a kid. These white bands are some kind of appliance. Appliances like this will sometimes have a manufacturer and serial number. If these do, we should be able to trace the manufacturer to the hospital, and pick up his ID."

Diaz said, "When will he hit the table?"

Beckett checked his clipboard.