Cause Of Death

Chapter 6

WE ARRIVED IN RICHMOND AT HALF PAST TWO, AND)the guard raised a gate and allowed us into the secluded neighborhood where I very recently had moved.

Typical for this area of Virginia, there had been no snow, and water dripped profusely from trees because rain had turned to ice during the night. Then the temperature had risen.

My stone house was set back from the street on a bluff that overlooked a rocky bend in the James River, the wooded lot surrounded by a wrought-iron fence neighboring children could not squeeze through. I knew no one on any side of me, and had no intention of changing that.

I had not anticipated problems when I had decided for the first time in my life that I would build, but whether it had been the slate roof, the brick pavers or the color of my front door, it seemed everyone had a criticism. When it had gotten to the point where my contractor's frustrated telephone calls were interrupting me in the morgue, I had threatened the neighborhood association that I would sue.

Needless to say, invitations to parties in this subdivision, thus far, had been few.

"I'm sure your neighbors will be delighted to see you're home," my niece dryly said as we got out of the car.

"I don't think they pay that much attention to me anymore." I dug for my keys.

"Bullshit," Marino said. "You're the only one they got who spends her days at murder scenes and cutting up dead bodies. They probably look out their windows the entire time you're home. Hell, the guards probably call every one of them to let 'em know when you roll in."

"Thank you so much," I said, unlocking the front door.

And just when I was beginning to feel a little better about living here."

The burglar alarm loudly buzzed its warning that I had better quickly press the appropriate keys, and I looked around as I always did, because my home was still a stranger to me. I feared the roof would leak, plaster would fall or something else would fail, and when everything was fine, I took intense pleasure in my accomplishment. My house was two levels and very open, with windows placed to catch every photon of light. The living room was a wall of glass that captured miles of the James, and late in the day I could watch the sun set over trees on the river's banks.

Adjoining my bedroom was an office that finally was big enough for me to work in, and I checked it first for faxes and found I had four.

"Anything important?" asked Lucy, who had followed me while Marino was getting boxes and bags.

"As a matter of fact, they're all for you from your mother." I handed them to her.

She frowned. "Why would she fax me here?"

"I never told her I was temporarily relocating to Sandbridge. Did you?"

"No. But Grans would know where you are, right?" Lucy said.

"Of course. But my mother and yours don't always get things straight." I glanced at what she was reading. "Everything okay?"

"She's so weird. You know, I installed a modem and CD ROM in her computer and showed her how to use them. My mistake. Now she's always got questions. Each of these faxes is a computer question." She irritably shuffled through the pages.

I was put out with her mother, Dorothy, too. She was my sister, my only sibling, and she could not be bothered to so much as wish her only child a happy New Year.

"She sent these today," my niece went on. "It's a holiday and she's writing away on another one of her goofy children's books."

"To be fair," I said, "her books aren't goofy."

"Yeah, go figure. I don't know where she did her research, but it wasn't where I grew up."

"I wish you two weren't at odds." I made the same comment I had made throughout Lucy's life. "Someday you will have to come to terms with her. Especially when she dies."

"You always think about death."

"I do because I know about it, and it is the other side of life. You can't ignore it any more than you can ignore night. You will have to deal with Dorothy."

"No, I won't," She swiveled my leather desk chair around and sat in it, facing me. "There's no point. She doesn't understand the first thing about me and never has."

That was probably true.

"You're welcome to use my computer," I said.

"It will just take me a minute."

"Marino will pick us up about four," I said.

"I didn't know he left."

"Briefly."

Keys tapped as I went into my bedroom and began to unpack and plot. I needed a car and wondered if I should rent one, and I needed to change my clothes but did not know what to wear. It bothered me that the thought of Wesley would still make me conscious of what I put on, and as minutes crept forward I became truly afraid to see him.

Marino picked us up when he said he would, and somewhere he had found a car wash open and had filled the tank with gas. We drove east along Monument Avenue into the district known as the Fan, where gracious mansions lined historic avenues and college students crowded old homes.

At the statue of Robert E. Lee, he cut over to Grace Street, where Ted Eddings had lived in a white Spanish duplex with a red Santa flag hanging over a wooden front porch with a swing. Bright yellow crime scene tape stretched from post to post in a morbid parody of Christmas wrapping, its bold black letters warning the curious not to come.

"Under the circumstances, I didn't want nobody inside, and I didn't know who else might have a key," Marino explained as he unlocked the front door. "What I don't need is some nosy landlord deciding he's going to check his friggin' inventory."

I did not see any sign of Wesley and was deciding he wasn't going to show up when I heard the throaty roar of his gray BMW. It parked on the side of the street, and I watched the radio antenna retract as he cut the engine.

"Doc, I'll wait for him if you want to go on in," Marino said to me.

"I need to talk to him." Lucy headed back down the steps.

"I'll be inside," I said and put on cotton gloves, as if Wesley were not someone I knew.

I entered Eddings' foyer and his presence instantly overwhelmed me everywhere I looked. I felt his meticulous personality in minimalist furniture, Indian rugs and polished floors, and his warmth in sunny yellow walls hung with bold monotype prints. Dust had formed a fine layer that was disturbed anywhere police might recently have been to open cabinets or drawers. Begonias, ficus, creeping fig and cyclamen seemed to be mourning the loss of their master, and I looked around for a watering can. Finding one in the laundry room, I filled it and began tending plants because I saw no point in allowing them to die. I did not hear Benton Wesley walk in.

"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. It would imply suicide."

"Which this case is not."

We looked at each other in the dark.

"I think someone entered his house late the night of his death."

"Someone he knew."

"Or someone who knew someone else who had access.

Like a colleague or close friend, or a significant other. As for keys to get in, his are missing."

"You think this has to do with the New Zionists." He was beginning to mellow.

"I'm afraid of that. And someone is warning me to back off."

"That would implicate the Chesapeake police."

"Maybe not the entire department," I said. "Maybe just Roche.

"If what you're saying is true, he's superficial in this, an outer layer far removed from the core. His interest in you is a separate issue, I suspect."

"His only interest is to intimidate, to bully," I said.

"And therefore, I suspect it is related."

Wesley got quiet, looking out the windshield, and for a moment I indulged myself and stared at him.

Then he turned to me. "Kay, has Dr. Mant ever said anything about being threatened?"

"Not to me. But I don't know if he would say anything.

Especially if he were frightened."

"Of what? That's what I'm having a very hard time imagining," he said as he started the car and pulled out onto the street. "If Eddings were linked to the New Zionists, then how could that possibly connect to Dr. Mant?"

I did not know, and was quiet as he drove.

He spoke again. "Any possibility your British colleague simply skipped town? Do you know for a fact that his mother died?"

I thought of my Tidewater morgue supervisor, who had quit before Christmas without giving notice or a reason.

Then Mant suddenly had left, too.

"I know only what he told me," I said. "But I have no reason to think he is lying."

"When does your other deputy chief come back, the one out on maternity leave?"

"She just had her baby."

"Well, that's a little hard to fake," he said.

We were turning on Malvern, and the rain was tiny pinpricks against the glass. Welling up inside me were words I could not say, and when we turned on Cary Street I began to feel desperate. I wanted to tell Wesley that we had made the right decision, but ending a relationship doesn't end feelings. I wanted to inquire after Connie, his wife. I wanted to invite him into my home as I had done in the past, and ask him why he never called me anymore. Old Locke Lane was without light as we followed it toward the river, and he drove slowly in low gear.

"Are you going back to Fredericksburg tonight?" I asked.

He was silent, then said, "Connie and I are getting a divorce."

I made no reply.

"It's a long story and will probably be a rather long drawn-out messy thing. Thank God, at least, the kids are pretty much grown." He rolled down his window and the guard waved us through.

"Benton, I'm very sorry," I said, and his BMW was loud on my empty, wet street.

"Well, you probably could say I got what I deserved.

She's been seeing another man for the better part of a year, and I was clueless. Some profiler I am, right?"

"Who is it?"

"He's a contractor in Fredericksburg and was doing some work on the house."

"Does she know about us?" I almost could not ask, for I had always liked Connie and was certain the truth would make her hate me.

We turned into my driveway and he did not answer until we had parked near my front door.

"I don't know." He took a deep breath and looked down at his hands on the wheel. "She's probably heard rumors, but she really doesn't listen to rumors, much less believe them." He paused. "She knows we've spent a lot of time together, taken trips, that sort of thing. But I really suspect she thinks that's solely because of work."

"I feel awful about all of this."

He said nothing.

"Are you still at home?" I asked.

"She wanted to move out," he replied. "She moved into an apartment where I guess she and Doug can regularly meet."

"That's the contractor's name."

His face was hard as he stared out the windshield. I reached over and gently took one of his hands.

"Look," I said quietly. "I want to help in any way I can. But you'll have to tell me what I can do."

He glanced at me, and for an instant his eyes shone with tears that I believed were for her. He still loved his wife, and though I understood, I did not want to see it.

"I can't let you do much for me." He cleared his throat.

"Right now especially. For pretty much the next year. This guy she's with likes money and knows I have some, you know, from my family. I don't want to lose everything."

"I don't see how you can, in light of what she's done."

"It's complicated. I have to be careful. I want my children to still care about me, to respect me." He looked at me and withdrew his hand. "You know how I feel. Please try to just leave it at that."

"Did you know about her in December, when we decided to stop- He interrupted me, "Yes. I knew."

"I see." My voice was tight. "I wish you could have told me. It might have made it easier."

"I don't think anything could have made it easier."

"Good night, Benton," I said as I got out of his car, and I did not turn around to watch him drive away.

Inside, Lucy was playing Melissa Etheridge, and I was glad my niece was here and that there was music in the house. I forced myself to not think about him, as if I could walk into a different room in my mind and lock him out.

Lucy was inside the kitchen, and I took my coat off and set my pocketbook on the counter.

"Everything okay?" She shut the refrigerator door with a shoulder and carried eggs to the sink.

"Actually, everything's pretty rotten," I said.

"What you need is something to eat, and as luck would have it, I'm cooking."

"Lucy"-I leaned against the counter-if someone is trying to disguise Eddings' death as an accident or suicide, then I can see how subsequent threats or intrigue concerning my Norfolk office might make sense. But why would threats have been made to any member of my staff in the past? Your deductive skills are good. You tell me."

She was beating egg whites into a bowl and thawing a bagel in the microwave. Her nonfat routines were depressing, and I did not know how she kept them up.

"You don't know that anyone was threatened in the past," she matter-of-factly said.

"I realize I don't know, at least not yet." I had begun making Viennese coffee. "But I'm simply trying to reason this out. I'm looking for a motive and coming up emptyhanded. Why don't you add a little onion, parsley and ground pepper to that? A pinch of salt can't hurt you, either.

"You want me to fix you one?" she asked as she whisked.

"I'm not very hungry. Maybe I'll eat soup later."

She glanced up at me. "Sorry everything's rotten."

I knew she referred to Wesley, and she knew I wasn't going to discuss him.

"Eddings' mother lives near here," I said. "I think I should talk to her."

"Tonight'? At the last minute?" The whisk lightly clicked against the sides of the bowl.

"She very well may want to talk tonight, at the last minute," I said. "She's been told her son is dead and not much more.

"Yeah," Lucy muttered. "Happy New Year."