"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.