McNulty returns to the container, as Beadie tells him about the cargo in the front of the container, and the false back that concealed the women, with a door that only opened from the outside. McNulty, looking around with a flashlight, asks whether the women were in the container for the whole trip, and Beadie says, "Probably not. Once they're at sea, there's usually someone in the crew who's in on it, you know? A shepherd? He lets them out to eat, move around, use the bathroom, whatever." She shines her light on one side of the compartment as she sadly adds, "They were clawing at the wall for air." McNulty, businesslike, asks where the air pipe is, and Beadie points to the ceiling of the compartment: "That's the hole. Pipe's up top." If this were some kind of wacky reality show, that would be where the cockroaches would have been dumped on the women inside. But...uh, it isn't.

Outside the container again, as Beadie walks up a ladder to the roof of the can, McNulty asks whether she gets a lot of stowaways. She says that there are a few, but that Customs or the INS normally finds them, and that most of those are from the Caribbean. "Not so much from Europe," McNulty surmises. "A bit more since 9/11, actually," Beadie replies. "I think because people can't get in on visas anymore like they used to." They've arrived at the hole now, which Beadie points out for McNulty: "Usually if the shepherd is doing his job, he tries to put a can like this on the bottom of the stack so they can pop it and the girls just walk out on the floor of the hold." McNulty asks where this one was, and Beadie sort of spreads her hands; she doesn't know. McNulty leans down to get a better look at the air hole from the outside, and directs Beadie's attention to something. The angle changes so we can see what they're looking at: while the rest of the roof is corrugated, like every container you've probably ever seen, one ridge is sort of flattened out at one end. Beadie doesn't get it, and as McNulty puts his hand out to feel the slat, she kind of suspiciously asks, "You said you were with the Marine Unit?" McNulty distractedly answers in the affirmative. Beadie: "What does the Marine Unit have to do with a bunch of dead girls in a can?" Is that a riddle? "Not a thing," McNulty admits. I would have also accepted "spite."