*
They drove a single loop of the scrapyard, just inside the fence. At each place where one terrace met another, there were shallow gravel ramps to allow passage. The rows of piled scrap were enormous, standing three stories high in places. It was like a scaled-up version of a supermarket, with the stock shelves rearing high above twenty-foot-wide aisles.
Passing the end of each open lane, they slowed and stared down its length as far as they could see. Most lanes ended in blind turns, suggesting a random maze of unseen passages beyond.
There was no sign of Whitcomb, or anyone else—until they came to the lot’s southeast corner.
Dryden stopped. He was looking to his left, out the driver’s-side window. He heard Marnie lean forward to look past him. He buzzed the window down and stared.
Twenty feet in past the mouth of an open lane was a makeshift fire pit: an old steel tractor rim that had been rolled into the middle of the channel and laid flat.
Thin tendrils of smoke snaked up from inside it.
“Let’s take a look,” Dryden said.
He killed the engine and got out, taking one of the Berettas in one hand and the plastic hardcase in the other. Leaving the machine unguarded for even a minute felt like a very bad idea.
He shut the driver’s door behind him as Marnie came around the hood. She had her Glock held ready.
There was no sign of anybody near the fire pit. Beyond it, the open lane between the stacks of scrap metal stretched away for nearly a hundred feet, to where it bent ninety degrees to the right, out of view. Between the fire pit and the distant corner, there were no openings leading away on either side.
Dryden crossed to the tire rim and crouched next to it. There was a bed of mostly cooled embers at the bottom, the carbonized remnants of what might have been plywood scraps—whatever firewood had been available amid the heaps of junk in this place.
There was an improvised grill suspended across the rim, some kind of grate that might have covered an air return duct in a building, years or decades ago. On the stony ground beside the rim, two metal cans stood open and empty. Their labels were gone, either torn off or burned off. It was clear the cans themselves had been used as makeshift pans to cook whatever had been inside them.
“Looks like he spent some time here,” Dryden said.
“We don’t know this was Whitcomb. Maybe high school kids come out here to party. Seems like the kind of place for that.”
“I don’t see any beer cans or cigarette butts,” Dryden said.
Marnie shrugged. “Litter-conscious high school kids.”
“Funny.”
Dryden turned in a slow circle, studying the rows of scrap metal on both sides. They seemed to form unbroken walls running from one end of the lane to the other. Except—
“Look at this,” Dryden said.
He went to the north-side wall, twenty feet farther in from the fire pit. There was a sheet of corrugated metal, the kind people used for pole barn roofs, leaning against the wall of scrap. The sheet stood upright, easily four feet by eight. Dryden took hold of one edge and pulled it sideways.
Behind it was a framed doorway leading into the scrap pile itself.
“What the hell?” Marnie said.
She came up beside Dryden. They stood and stared.
It was clear within seconds what they were seeing. Embedded in the base of the huge scrap pile was a standard-sized shipping container—the kind of modular unit that could serve as a train car, a semitrailer, or a massive cargo crate aboard a ship.
This one had been set down at a rough angle at the bottom of the stack of wreckage, and then mostly covered by it over time; only one corner of the container was visible, exposed like a portion of a fossil jutting from a shale outcropping.
The framed metal doorway was wide open; its door appeared to have been torched off and discarded ages ago. Where the hinges had been cut through, the exposed metal was long since rusted and pitted.
The space beyond the threshold loomed black like the depth of a cave. Dryden could smell the air inside—lots of smells, and none of them good.
“Got a flashlight?” he asked.
He glanced at Marnie and saw that she was already holding a pocket Maglite. She clicked it on and aimed its beam into the darkness. Dryden ducked and stepped through the opening, and Marnie followed.