"It's so sad," she said. "Don't you think it's sad?"

"Yes."

"Even if nobody's killing anybody, even if all the deaths are perfectly natural, there's something absolutely heartbreaking about the idea of this group just dwindling away. I suppose it's life, but that makes life a pretty sad business."

"Well," I said, "who ever said it wasn't?"

On the way past the desk we traded greetings with the concierge. We had our individual names on the mailbox and the building's directory, but as far as the staff was concerned we were Mr. and Mrs. Scudder.

ELAINE MARDELL, her shop sign says.

Upstairs, she made coffee while I went over my notes. Wayne Fletcher had died six years ago, not eight or nine, of complications arising from coronary-bypass surgery. I told Elaine as much when she came into the living room with her tea and my coffee.

"It may have been borderline malpractice," I said, "according to Hildebrand, but it's a real stretch to call it murder."

"That's something. The poor man didn't sign his own death warrant when he let himself be talked into rejoining the group."

"Unless someone visited him in the hospital," I went on, "and tampered with his IV."

"I didn't even think of that," she said. "Honey, are you going to be able to check out all of this on your own? It sounds as though you'll have to go in a dozen different directions at once. And how much help can TJ be?"

TJ is a black teenager with no fixed address beyond his beeper number. "He's resourceful," I reminded Elaine.

"So he says," she said, "and so he is, but somehow I can't see him interviewing middle-aged businessmen at the Addison Club."

"He can do some legwork for me. As far as the rest of it goes, I won't have to go over all seventeen deaths with a magnifying glass and a pair of tweezers. All I have to do is find out for certain if there's a pattern of serial murder operating, and be able to support that argument with enough evidence so I can turn it over to the cops and be sure they'll give it their undivided attention. If I can bring that off, the case will get the benefit of a full-scale official investigation without starting out as a media circus."