“Any clothes?”
Ida Belle had been checking under the bed and rose, shaking her head. “No clothes, bags, nothing personal.”
“There’s one towel in the hamper,” I said.
“Nickel would have hauled laundry out with him,” Ida Belle said.
Gertie shrugged. “He’s a man, and a young one at that.”
“Not even young men like the smell of mildew or throwing away perfectly good towels,” Ida Belle argued.
“You’d be surprised at what young men will choose over doing laundry,” Gertie said, “but he wouldn’t have gone without taking the trash with him. Those wrappers will attract ants at best. At worst, other things.”
I stepped back to the door and squatted, checking the doorframe. “No sign of forced entry. And there’s no scrapes on the lock. Did you check the windows?”
“They’re all locked and all the blinds are down,” Gertie said. “But then, if someone came in an open window, they could have locked it behind them and drawn the blinds.”
“Twenty bucks says you couldn’t open one of those windows if you wanted to,” Ida Belle said. “Looks like they’ve been painted over more than once.”
“Let’s give it a try.”
The room only contained four windows and the bathroom none, but a quick check showed that Ida Belle had been correct. Even if all the windows had been unlatched, it would have taken a crowbar to get them up. Which meant that whoever had entered the camp had done it through the front door. And there was every indication that person had used a key.
“Get Rambo in here,” I said. “Her smell is probably everywhere, but maybe he can find something we missed.”
Ida Belle nodded and went out to retrieve the hound. As soon as she brought him in and released him, he scrambled around the camp, sniffing every inch and baying as he went, signaling that the girl had been inside. Then he went into the bathroom and really set up a howl and started digging the bathroom rug.
Ida Belle called him off and I rolled the rug back. It looked like the same worn wood slats as the rest of the camp, but then I spotted what appeared to be a knothole but was a little too precise. I stuck my finger in and triggered a latch and then pulled the piece up. As I suspected, directly below it was an old wooden ladder I’d seen leaning against a piling that stood behind some sheets of old plywood. It looked as if it was simply stored there, but now we knew better.
“Why would Nickel have an escape hatch?” I asked.
“Drugs,” Ida Belle said. “He probably kept things stored here or did them here and figured if the law rode up, he had a way to get out and dispose of everything so they couldn’t find it.”
Since he did five years over the stuff, I guessed it wasn’t as successful as he’d originally thought. But he also hadn’t gone to the trouble of closing it up, and Rambo’s response made it clear that the girl had exited the camp this way. The question was, why? Who was coming in that forced her to flee?
I closed up the door and put the rug back. “Wait here. I’m going to go downstairs and see if I can trigger that door from underneath.”
The keyhole hadn’t appeared to go all the way through, which wouldn’t have been optimum from an insect and mouse standpoint, but I wanted to make sure there wasn’t a second way to trigger opening. It only took a quick look at the bottom of the trapdoor to see there was no release underneath. So it was definitely constructed to be a one-way sort of deal. I headed back inside and told them what I’d found.
“Let’s lock up,” I said. “I want to check farther up the bayou and see if we can find a boat. That girl might have gotten out of the camp through that hatch, but she didn’t come in that way. And she didn’t walk here.”
Gertie nodded. “I’m going to grab that trash and the towel. Nickel’s got his hands full with his dad, and we’re already here.”
“I’m sure he’ll appreciate it,” Ida Belle said.
We got secured in the boat and then cruised slowly up the bayou until the water got too low, but we hadn’t spotted anything along the way.
Ida Belle shook her head. “That girl did not materialize in Nickel’s camp, and she was clearly running from someone to have wound up where she did. And the only way she could have gotten there was by boat. So where is the person who brought her? And why did they leave her?”
“Maybe the girl got away and that person didn’t,” I said. “And if the people looking for them found them here, then they would have taken their boat as well. But we have one answer—where she was staying.”
“But a million more questions,” Gertie said. “Story of our lives.”
“Sure seems that way,” I agreed. “We’ve found all we can out here. Let’s head back in. I need to be ready to pick up Blanchet when he calls. If I leave him waiting too long, he might burn the place down.”
I pulled out my cell phone and called Nickel. He was shocked to hear what we’d discovered.
“How many people know where you keep the key?”
“Everyone and their cousin. I ain’t ever had no problems out there. I mean, sure, people have stopped off when they got out in a bad storm, but most people leave a note and a couple bucks if they eat or drink anything.”
“And the hatch? Does everyone know about that too?”
“Heck, I don’t know. It was mentioned in a police report from one of my arrests, but that’s some deep digging on someone if they found it. Guess I should nail it up, right? And definitely change the lock. But then, if that girl was trying to get away from someone, sounds like that hatch got her gone.”
“It does.”
“Man, I don’t want any part of this. Do you know what kind of hassle it is for a young, single guy with a criminal record to be linked up with anything to do with an underage female? Might as well tie an anchor around me and toss me in the bayou.”
If Carter was here or Blanchet was still in charge, I would have disagreed, at least from the police perspective. But with Hermes running the show, I had no doubt that he’d zero in on Nickel just to save himself the hassle.
“Is this guy filling in for Carter going to be a problem?” he asked.
“Loaded question.” I explained the situation with Blanchet and Hermes, and he launched into a ranting and cussing fit that was both creative and impressive.
“I know that a-hole Hermes. A buddy of mine got two years because of him and his trumped-up ‘investigation.’ That guy is lazy and corrupt, and he’ll throw someone under the bus to fluff up his résumé.”
“Yeah, I got that impression, and I’m not breathing a word of what we found. I’m already in neck-deep taking that shoe, and Hermes is just looking for a reason to arrest me and score some points with his buddy, the ADA.”
Nickel launched into another round of impressive cursing.
“Look, I know you had nothing to do with this situation,” I said. “So unless Hermes gets his lazy butt into the bayou and pokes around, he’s not going to find out the girl was at your camp. Gertie got the trash and the towel, so there’s no signs that anyone has been there. The only way he’d know she was there is to take prints.”