My name is Joe Jackson. I'm a detective with the police department. I love this job because I try to solve a new puzzle every day.

My job takes me lots of different places. One day I get called to a house where there has been a robbery. I walk into the home, and the family is sitting there sad, confused and angry. All the furniture has been turned upside down, and just about everything valuable has been taken. There's a ton of evidence, but you have to know where to look for it.

Another day, I'm looking at a warehouse that has burned to the ground. There's ash and soot everywhere, and most of the building is gone. The warehouse used to be full of furniture; it all burned hot and fast, so there aren't many clues. All that's left of the merchandise is a pile of springs, nails and tacks. Was it an accident, or could it have been set on fire?

Another day, I'm deep in the woods looking at a skeleton that someone found buried in the leaves. The victim's body has completely decayed, but the clothing is still there because it's made of polyester. The person has been dead for quite a while, so clues will be difficult to find. But they're there if you know how to find them.

To some people, this kind of work does not sound like much fun. It can get a little gruesome. But to me, it's all fascinating. Every case is a new, special puzzle, and my job is to help solve it. I do that by looking for evidence, carefully collecting it and then studying it to see what it tells me. The evidence can come from a million different places. I work with all sorts of scientists and experts to help analyze the evidence and figure out what happened.

Try This: Fingerprinting Learn how to fingerprint your classmates and create your own fingerprint records.

One of the most important parts of my job is to ask questions and then try to piece together the answers. Take the case of the skeleton in the park. I've got lots of questions: The first one is pretty obvious: who died?

If things follow the normal pattern, I have a pretty good chance of finding the answer to this question. The second question is, When did the person die? With a skeleton it is difficult to get a precise time of death. But I know that it takes at least six months for a body to completely decompose -- which is what happened here. But without studying things a lot more carefully, it can be hard to tell much more than that.

So how did this person die? That's another good question. But the most important question may be why this person died. Since we have only a skeleton to work with, finding answers can be tough. But you never know - sometimes you get lucky. Did someone kill the person? Did the person die of natural causes while hiking in the woods? Maybe a wild bear is responsible? (Not likely - not too many bears in a city park.) But you never know. What if a bear escaped from the circus two years ago and was loose for three days before being recaptured? I have to think about stuff like that and follow any leads.

Let's start with the question of who this person is. If you have an intact body or even a skeleton, this question is usually pretty easy to answer with today's technology. Believe it or not, there are people who specialize in analyzing skeletons. A skeleton expert can look at the remains and tell quite a bit about the person, including height, gender and sometimes age. Obviously, kids have much smaller skeletons than adults do. You can use that kind of information in a database of missing persons to narrow things down.

The easiest way to find the specific identity of the victim is to use dental records. Every time you go to the dentist, your dentist takes X-rays and keeps track of all the fillings you get. An expert can match the teeth of the skeleton with those dental records pretty easily. But that is true only if the person has been reported missing. If not, then it may be impossible to ever discover the identity. Right now, there is no system to check the dental records of every person in the United States.

How did the person die? There are lots of different clues that the experts will look for. For example:

• Are there any holes in the clothes? Small holes can mark a place where a bullet passed through, while large holes could come from a knife or a bite.
• Knives, bites and bullets might also leave marks on the bones. If a bullet hits or grazes a bone, it will leave a mark. If someone hits a person on the head with a bat, that might leave a mark on the skull.
• What is in the soil under the skeleton? We will sift the soil very carefully. A bullet lodged in the body will fall out when the body decays. It is also possible to find jewelry, coins, or even something that a murderer might have dropped accidentally.