His presence would comfort me. No one else knew, except Ruby, and she still fluttered around me like an edgy mother hen. "Yeah, come on. I have some things to talk to you about."
Daniel rang the doorbell less than five minutes later. Ruby let him in. He introduced himself, and she busied herself with making coffee and baking a lemon cake. "I just handle things better when I'm doing something with my hands," she explained. Her activity in the kitchen left privacy for Daniel and me.
"What do you know about this Carter asshole?" I asked.
"He has a police record." Daniel sat on the couch across from me. I did feel calmer with him around. "A couple of drug possession arrests. Employed at a family steakhouse as a cook. He didn't do this for political reasons; not his, anyway. I think he's just a hired gun."
"A thug," I mumbled.
"Right. The police are still talking to him. As soon as I find out more-"
"I want to go down there," I insisted.
"To the jail?"
"Yes, I want to know what else they've found out. They have to tell me, don't they?"
Daniel considered it for a moment. "No, not necessarily."
"But you can make them."
"I'm a reporter; they'll talk to you before me."
I thought of Mark, using his influence to get some answers, but then the mess he had with Kathleen came back to mind. "I don't care, I can't sit here waiting. Go with me?"
"Let's go." Daniel got up and headed for the door. "Nice to meet you, Ms. Harris," he said to Ruby as I kissed her good-bye.
At the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department, we waited in a small, bland room, only big enough for a table. I glanced up at the fluorescent light in the ceiling. "How do they shine that in a suspect's eyes to make him talk?"
Daniel looked up and smiled. "They wheel in the big lamp with the electric shock equipment."
Officer Gloria Blevins, the young black cop who had been at the house the night Ruby was missing, came in. "Guys, he's confessed to the attack on Ruby Harris and to the one on you," she nodded toward me, "and Harold Grouse at the Observer offices."
I asked the obvious next question, "Why?"
"Says," she looked at some papers in front of her, "he was hired to scare you. Doesn't know, or won't tell us, who hired him."
"Scare me?" I jumped up from the metal chair making it scratch across the concrete floor. "Scare me? He put Ruby in the hospital." I stared at Daniel, then back at Officer Blevins.
Sitting on the corner of the table, she leaned in as if she intended on sharing a secret with us. "Carter said that Ms. Harris saw him outside; he went to the door, and she came at him with a baseball bat."
"How'd she end up with a concussion in the attic?" I asked.
She scanned her notes. "Carter says he left her there, tied to a chair so he could get away before she called the police. He swears he never hurt her."
When I found Ruby, she was tied in an overturned chair. Could she have knocked it over and hit her head in the fall? "Did he say who helped him?"
"Helped him?" Officer Blevins asked.
"Yeah, he couldn't have carried Ruby up those attic steps."
"I assumed she climbed them herself." Blevins looked over Carter's confession again. "He said he was there alone, and she was conscious when he left her."
Daniel rubbed his chin. "Did he say what he did after he left Ruby's house?"
"No," Blevins answered. "Why do you ask?"
I looked at Daniel, wondering where he was going with the question.
"If you're hired to scare someone, and that person isn't where you thought he was," he constructed the scenario, "and you tied up an old woman in an attic, I would say you botched your job. Wouldn't he have told whoever hired him?"
"Why?" I asked. "Why would he bother?"
"If something had happened to Ruby… say no one came to check on her for several days, she could have died. He would have committed murder. He's not a murderer."
"You weren't the one he attacked this afternoon. I think he's capable of murder."
"Maybe," Daniel said, "but he didn't come at you with a weapon. He didn't have a weapon that night with Ruby. He left her hidden, and I think he told whoever hired him where she was."
Officer Blevins jotted down something. "We'll get his phone records to see what numbers he called that night. Is there anything else you can give me?"
"Won't his lawyer stop him from answering questions?" I knew the police were getting too much information for any attorney to be involved.
"Read him his Miranda, and he declined counsel." Blevins grinned. "I'll be right back." She left the room, closing the door behind her.
"Damn," I looked at Daniel, "I forgot to ask about the noose."
"What noose?"
I hadn't told him about the noose hanging from the oak. "When I got home that night, there was a noose hanging from the oak; the police tried to say it was just a hanging basket, but I think he strung a noose from the oak to frighten me. The same oak Mr. Sams was hanged from."
"Mr. Sams?"
"Sorry, Caleb Sampson. Walterene and Ruby called him Mr. Sams. That was part of the scare, because I knew about Mr. Sams."
Daniel stood and opened the door; he looked down the hall for Officer Blevins. "Let's go find her."
Just as we started out the door, she stepped around a corner. I ran up to her. "Did he say anything about using a noose to scare me? Can I talk to him?"
"No and no. We found no sign of a noose Saturday night, just a macramé flowerpot holder," she said while steering me back to the little room. "You need to stay here. We're still getting information from him."
"But…" I started as she closed the door. Daniel sighed and leaned against the cinderblock wall. "If he put the noose there…" I trailed off as thoughts took over. The phone calls, the attacks, never mentioned Mr. Sams. I had linked them together. Could I have interwoven what I read from the diaries with what happened to me? Clearing my mind of Mr. Sams' death, I tried to piece together what the capture of Bert Carter and his mission to scare me out of town meant.
"You okay?" Daniel asked as he walked over and touched my shoulder.
"Yeah, I think I am." I smiled, glad that he was with me. "In fact, I have a few questions for some family members."
Chapter Twenty-Five
THE ATTACKS DIDN'T occur because of what I knew about Mr. Sams, I had concluded that much, but Carter was hired to scare me out of town. Why? I sat on the front-porch chain-smoking, flicking ashes into Ruby's geranium pot. Vernon would become a senator no matter what I did. So why would the family, his supporters, or whoever, want me out of the way? I wish I did have the power to derail his campaign. His small-mindedness, his bigotry, his intolerance should not be added to what already inhabited the Senate.
Ruby opened the door. "Mark's on the phone."
I jumped up and almost ran to pick up the receiver. "You okay?" I asked.
"Can you come over?" He sounded defeated.
Fifteen minutes later, I entered his penthouse. The sun had set, and few lights illuminated the grandeur of the place; the darkness and shadows fit his mood. Mark, still in his navy business suit, led me into the living area and plopped down on the leather couch.
"Kathleen's gone," he mumbled.
"What happened?" I asked in a low voice.
He pulled his tie off and popped loose the collar button of his shirt; his weary eyes held tinges of red around the edges, and an empty bottle of beer sat on the coffee table in front of him. "She knows. Fuck, she knew all along."
"What happens now?" I was almost afraid to ask. He didn't seem to be in a mood to discuss the future since the recent past had hurt him so badly.
"I'll give her some time." He looked up at me as if the plan was set in his mind. "Then I'll bring her back home."