I said, "You think the members are being murdered."

"Yes."

"Because the actual deaths have been so greatly in excess of probability."

"That's part of it. That's what got me looking for an explanation."

"And?"

"I sat down and made a list of our deceased members and the various ways they died. Some of them very obviously had not been murdered, their deaths could only have been the result of natural causes. Phil Kalish, for example, killed in a head-on on the LIE. The other driver was drunk, he'd managed to get on the wrong side of the divider and was speeding eastbound in the westbound lane. If he'd lived he might have been prosecuted for vehicular homicide, but it doesn't sound like something some devious mass murderer could have arranged."

"No."

"And some Viet Cong or North Vietnamese soldier killed Jim Severance. Death in combat isn't something you usually think of as a natural cause, but I wouldn't call it murder, either." His fingers just touched the bowl of the snifter, then withdrew. "There were some natural deaths that couldn't have been anything else. Roger Bookspan developed testicular cancer that had metastasized by the time they caught it. They tried a bone-marrow transplant but he didn't survive the procedure." His face darkened at the memory. "He was only thirty-seven, the poor son of a bitch. Married, two kids under five, a first novel written and accepted for publication, and all of a sudden he was gone."

"That must have been a while ago."

"Close to twenty years. One of our early deaths. More recently, there were a couple of heart attacks. I mentioned Frank DiGiulio, and then two years ago Victor Falch dropped dead on the golf course. He was sixty years old, forty pounds overweight, and diabetic, so I don't suppose you'd call that suspicious circumstances."