This is clearly untrue. Several employees are visible from here, and half of them are pudgy white guys. The other half are lean Latinos.

‘Well, we’re tracing a phone signal,’ Thistle says. ‘Same as last time. Maybe we could talk in your office?’

‘Uh, sure,’ Edwards says.

As he leads us over to his shipping container, he keeps glancing at one of the others. One with no windows.

The back of my neck is prickling. Something’s going on here, although I don’t know what.

Edwards’s office has a single chair, a small desk, two filing cabinets and a plastic fern. Through the small window, I can see the mountains of garbage, but not the road, the vehicles or the people. From in here it looks like the whole world has ended.

‘Like I told you last time,’ Edwards is saying, ‘we don’t inventory everything that comes here. If one of my boys sees a gun, or drugs, we call it in. Anything else just goes on the pile.’

‘So no one’s handed in a suspicious phone lately?’ Thistle asks.

‘No. But to be honest, if it was a new model in working order, someone might have just kept it. Especially the new guys. The first couple of weeks, they’re amazed what people throw away, and they take a lot of stuff home. Then they get over it. Or their garage fills up, and they realise why the stuff got thrown away in the first place.’

The phone trail ends here. If someone took it, they haven’t switched it on. Unless they swapped out the SIM card first. I’ll have to remember to ask Vasquez if there’s another way to trace it.

‘What about things that could be recycled?’ I ask. ‘You have to separate that out, right?’

‘The recycling centre is a half mile that way,’ he says, pointing east. ‘Things are here because people can’t recycle them, or don’t want to for whatever reason. Not much sorting happens.’

‘When the pile gets too big,’ I say, ‘then what?’

‘Then it gets buried, so it doesn’t get scattered by animals. Or the weather,’ he adds. ‘During Hurricane Harvey it rained trash over half the town. Now City Hall says we gotta bury twice a month, not just once.’

‘Does the name Shannon Luxford mean anything to you?’ I ask.

He puts on the same show as before—raised gaze, pursed lips. ‘I don’t think so. Why?’

‘No reason,’ I ask. ‘What’s in the other shipping container?’

His expression shifts. I can almost sense his blood pressure rising. ‘Just files and stuff.’

‘You don’t keep your files here?’ I gesture to the filing cabinets.

‘Only the new ones,’ he says. ‘Old stuff gets archived.’

Thistle leans forwards. ‘We’d like to take a look, if that’s okay,’ she says.