Cause of Death

  "Kay?" His voice was quiet behind me.

  I turned and he caught sorrow not meant for him.

  "What are you doing?" He stared as I poured water into a pot.

  "Exactly what it looks like."

  He got quiet, his eyes on mine.

  "I knew him, knew Ted," I said. "Not terribly well. But he was popular with my staff. He interviewed me many times and I respected ... Well . . . " My mind left the path.

  Wesley was thin, which made his features seem even sharper, his hair by now completely white, although he wasn't much older than I. He did look tired, but everyone I knew looked tired, and what he did not look was separated. He did not look miserable to be away from his wife or from me.

  "Pete told me about your cars," he said.

  "Pretty unbelievable," I said as I poured.

  "And the detective. What's his name? Roche? I've got to talk to his chief anyway. We're playing telephone tag, but when we hook up, I'll say something."

  "I don't need you to do that."

  "I certainly don't mind," he said.

  "I'd rather you didn't."

  "Fine." He raised his hands in a small surrender and looked around the room. "He had money and was gone a lot," he said.

  "Someone took care of his plants," I replied.

  "How often?" He looked at them.

  "Non-blooming plants, at least once a week, the rest, every other day, depending on how warm it gets in here."

  "So these haven't been watered for a week?"

  "Or longer," I said.

  By now, Lucy and Marino had entered the duplex and gone down the hall.

  "I want to check the kitchen," I added as I set down the can.

  "Good idea."

  It was small and looked like it had not been renovated since the sixties, Inside cupboards I found old cook-ware and dozens of canned goods like tuna fish and soup, and snack foods like pretzels. As for what Eddings had kept in his refrigerator, that was mostly beer. But I was interested in a single bottle of Louis Roederer Crystal Champagne tied in a big red bow.

  "Find something?" Wesley was looking under the sink.

  "Maybe." I was still peering inside the refrigerator.

  "This will set you back as much as a hundred and fifty dollars in a restaurant, maybe a hundred and twenty if you buy it off the shelf."

  "Do we know how much this guy got paid?"

  "I don't know. But I suspect it wasn't a whole lot."

  "He's got a lot of shoe polish and cleansers down here, and that's about it," Wesley said as he stood.

  I turned the bottle around and read a sticker on the label.

  "A hundred and thirty dollars, and it wasn't purchased locally. As far as I know, Richmond doesn't have a wine shop called The Wine Merchant."

  "Maybe a gift. Explaining the bow."

  "What about D.C.?

  "I don't know. I don't buy much wine in D.C. these days," he said.

  I shut the refrigerator door, secretly pleased, for he and I had enjoyed wine. We once had liked to pick and choose and drink as we sat close to each other on the couch or in bed.

  "He didn't shop much," I said. "I see no evidence that he ever ate in."

  "It doesn't look to me like he was ever even here," he said.

  I felt his closeness as he moved near me, and I almost could not bear it. His cologne was always subtle and evocative of cinnamon and wood, and whenever I smelled it anywhere, for an instant I was caught as I was now.

  "Are you all right?" he asked in a voice meant for no one but me as he paused in the doorway.

  "No," I said. "This is pretty awful." I shut a cabinet door a little too hard.

  He stepped into the hallway. "Well, we need to take a hard look at his financial status, to see where he was getting money for eating out and expensive champagne."

  Those papers were in the office, and the police had not gone through them yet because officially there had been no crime. Despite my suspicions about Eddings' cause of death and the strange events surrounding it, at this moment we legally had no homicide.

  "Has anyone gone into this computer?" asked Lucy, who was looking at the 486 machine on the desk.

  "Nope," said Marino as he sorted through files in a green metal cabinet. "One of the guys said we're locked out."

  She touched the mouse and a password window appeared on the screen.

  "Okay," she said. "He's got a password, which isn't unusual. But what is a little strange is he's got no disk in his backup drive. Hey, Pete? You guys find any disks in here?"

  "Yeah, there's a whole box of them up there." He pointed at a bookcase, which was crowded with histories of the Civil War and an elaborate leather-bound set of encyclopedias.

  Lucy took the box down and opened it.

  "No. These are programming disks for WordPerfect."

  She looked at us. "All I'm saying is most people would have a backup of their work, assuming he was working on something here in his house."

  No one knew if he had been. We knew only that Eddings was employed by the AP office downtown on Fourth Street.

  We had no reason to know what he did at home, until Lucy rebooted his computer, did her magic and somehow got into programming files. She disabled the screen saver, then started sorting through WordPerfect directories, all of which were empty. Eddings did not have a single file.

  "Shit," she said. "Now that really is bizarre unless he never used his computer." I

  "I can't imagine that," I said. "Even if he did work downtown, he must have had an office at home for a reason. She typed some more, while Marino and Wesley sifted through various financial records that Eddings had neatly stored in a basket inside a filing cabinet drawer.

  "I just hope he didn't blow away his entire subdirectory," said Lucy, who was in the operating system now.

  "I can't restore that without a backup, and he doesn't seem to have a backup."

  I watched her type undelete*.* and hit the enter key.

  Miraculously, a file named killdrugold appeared, and after she was prompted to keep it, another name followed. By the time she was finished, she had recovered twenty-six files as we watched in amazement.

  . "That's what's cool about DOS 6," she simply said as she began printing.

  "Can you tell when they were deleted?" Wesley asked.

  "The time and date on the files is all the same," she replied. "Damn. December thirty-first, between one-oh-one and one-thirty-five A.M. You would have thought he'd already be dead by then."

  "It depends on what time he went to Chesapeake," I said. "His boat wasn't spotted until Six A.M."

  "By the way, the clock's set right on the computer. So these times ought to be good," she added.

  "Would it take more than half an hour to delete that many files?" I asked.

  "No. You could do it in minutes."

  "Then someone might have been reading them as he was deleting them," I said.

  "That's what a lot of people do. We need more paper for the printer. Wait, I'll steal some from the fax machine."

  "Speaking of that," I said, "can we get a journal report?"

  . "Sure."

  She produced a list of meaningless fax diagnostics and telephone numbers that I had an idea about checking later.

  But at least we knew with certainty that around the time Eddings had died, someone had gone into his computer and had deleted every one of his files. Whoever was responsible wasn't terribly sophisticated, Lucy went on to explain, because a computer expert would have removed the files' subdirectory, too, rendering the undelete command useless.

  "This isn't making sense," I said. "A writer is going to back up his work, and it is evident that he was anything but careless. What about his gun safe?" I asked Marino.

  "Did you find any disks in there?"

  Nope.

  "That doesn't mean someone didn't get into it, and the house, for that matter," I said.

  "If they did, they knew the combination of the safe and the code for the burglar alarm
system."

  "Are they the same?" I asked.

  "Yeah. He uses his D.O.B. for everything."

  "And how did you find that out?"

  "His mother," he said.

  "What about keys?" I said. "None came in with the body. He must have had some to drive his truck."

  "Roche said there aren't any," Marino said, and I thought that odd, too.

  Wesley was watching pages of undeleted files come off the printer. "These all look like newspaper stories," he said.

  "Published?" I asked.

  "Some may have been because they look pretty old. The plane that crashed into the White House, for example. And Vince Foster's suicide."

  "Maybe Eddings was just cleaning house," Lucy proposed.

  "Oh, now here we go." Marino was reviewing a bank statement. "On December tenth, three thousand dollars was wired to his account," He opened another envelope and looked some more. "Same thing for November."

  it was also true for October and the rest of the year, and based on other information, Eddings definitely needed to supplement his income. His mortgage payment was a thousand dollars a month, his monthly charge card bills sometimes as much, yet his annual salary was barely forty-five thousand dollars.

  "Shit. With all this extra cash coming in, he was sucking in almost eighty grand a year," Marino said. "Not bad."

  Wesley left the printer and walked over to where I stood.

  He quietly placed a page in my hand.

  "The obituary for Dwain Shapiro," he said. "Washington Post, October sixteenth of last year."

  The article was brief and simply stated that Shapiro had been a mechanic at a Ford dealership in D.C., and was shot to death in a carjacking while on his way home from a bar late at night. He was survived by people who lived nowhere near Virginia, and the New Zionists were not mentioned.

  "Eddings didn't write this," I said. "A reporter for the Post did."

  "Then how did he get the Book?" Marino said. "And why the hell was it under his bed?"

  "He might have been reading it," I answered simply.

  "And maybe he didn't want anyone else-a housekeeper, for example-to see it."

  "These are notes now." Lucy was engrossed in the screen, opening one file after another and hitting the print command. "Okay, now we're getting to the good stuff.

  Damn." She was getting excited as text scrolled by and the LaserJet hummed and clicked. "How wild." She stopped what she was doing and turned around to Wesley. "He's got all this stuff about North Korea mixed in with info about Joel Hand and the New Zionists."

  "What about North Korea?" He was reading pages while Marino went through another drawer.

  "The problem our government had with theirs several years ago when they were trying to make weapons-grade plutonium at one of their nuclear power plants."

  "Supposedly, Hand is very interested in fusion, energy, that sort of thing," I said. "There's an allusion to that in the Book."

  "Okay," said Wesley, "then maybe this is just a big profile on him. Or better stated, the raw makings of a big piece on him."

  "Why would Eddings delete the file of a big article he had not yet finished?" I wanted to know. "And is it a coincidence that he did this the night he died?"

  "That could be consistent with someone planning to commit suicide," Wesley said. "And we really can't be certain he didn't do that."

  "Right," Lucy said. "He wipes out all his work so that after he's gone, no one's going to see anything he doesn't want them to see. Then he stages his death to look like an accident. Maybe it mattered a lot to him that people not think he killed himself."

  "A strong possibility," Wesley agreed. "He may have been involved in something he couldn't get out of, thus explaining the money wired to his bank account every month. Or he could have suffered from depression or from an intense personal loss that we know nothing of."

  "Someone else could have deleted the files and taken any backup disks or printouts," I said. "Someone may have done this after he was already dead."

  "Then this person had a key, knew codes and combinations," he said. "He knew Eddings wasn't home and wasn't going to be." He glanced up at me.

  "Yes," I said.

  "That's pretty complicated."

  "This case is very complicated," I said, "but I can tell you with certainty that if Eddings were poisoned underwater with cyanide gas, he could not have done this to himself And I want to know why he had so many guns. I want to know why the one he was carrying in his johnboat has a Birdsong coating and was loaded with KTWs."

  Wesley glanced again at me, and his unflappability was hitting me hard. "Certainly, one could view his survivalist tendencies as an indicator of instability," he said.

  "Or fear of being murdered," I said.

  Then we went into that room. Submachine guns were on a rack on the wall, and pistols, revolvers and ammunition were inside the Browning safe that police had opened this morning. Ted Eddings had equipped a small bedroom with an arbor press, digital scale, case trimmer, reloading dies and everything else needed to keep him in cartridges. Copper tubing and primers were stored in a drawer. Gunpowder was in an old military case, and it seemed he had been fond of laser sights and spotting scopes.

  "I think this shows a tilted mind-set." It was Lucy who spoke as she squatted before the safe, opening hard plastic gun cases. "I'd call all of this more than a little paranoid.

  It's like he thought an army was coming."

  "Paranoia is healthy if there really is someone after you," I said.

  "Me, I'm beginning to think the guy was wacky," Marino replied.

  I did not care about their theories. "I smelled cyanide in the morgue," I reminded them as my patience wore thinner.

  "He didn't gas himself before going into the river, or he would have been dead when he hit the water."

  "You smelled cyanide," Wesley said, pointedly. "No one else did, and we don't have tox results yet."

  "What are you implying, that he drowned himself?" I stared at him.

  "I don't know."

  "I saw nothing to indicate drowning," I said.

  "Do you always see indications in drownings?" he reasonably asked. "I thought drownings were notoriously difficult, explaining why expert witnesses from South Florida are often flown in to help with such cases."

  "I began my career in South Florida and am considered an expert witness in drownings," I sharply said.

  We continued arguing outside on the sidewalk by his car because I wanted him to take me home so we could finish our fight. The moon was vague, the nearest streetlight a block away, and we could not see each other well.

  "For God's sake, Kay, I was not implying that you don't know what you're doing," he was saying.

  "You most certainly were." I was standing by the driver's door as if the car were mine and I was about to leave in it. "You're picking on me. You're acting like an ass."

  "We're investigating a death," he said in that steady tone of his. "This is not the time or place for anything to be taken personally."

  "Well, let me tell you something, Benton, people aren't machines. They do take things personally."

  "And that's really what this is all about." He moved beside me and unlocked the door. "You're reacting personally because of me. I'm not sure this was a good idea."

  Locks rushed up. "Maybe I shouldn't have come here today." He slid into the driver's seat. "But I felt it was important. I was trying to do the right thing and thought you would do the same."

  I walked around to the other side and got in, and wondered why he had not opened my door when he usually did. Suddenly, I was very weary and afraid I might cry.

  "It is important, and you did do the right thing," I said.

  "A man is dead. I not only believe he was murdered but think he might have been caught up in something bigger that I fear may be very ugly. I don't think he deleted his own computer files and disposed of all backups because that would imply he knew he was going to die."

  "Yes. I
t would imply suicide."