Free The Book of Kills by Ralph McInerny

with the Plants. He would risk that he had enough power to get home. It was only several hundred yards away. He told the Plants that as he squeezed behind the wheel.
    “They stole all this land too.” Orion said. Marcia, not dressed for it, had come outside too, and she clung to her husband’s arm. As he drove away Roger was saddened by the thought that he had learned enough to give credence to the view that Orion had toppled gravestones and, more grave, kidnapped the chancellor, the trustee Noonan, and Father Anselm. Even so, theinformation was wanted to neutralize his charges, not to have him put in prison. There was consolation in that.
    The wind had gone down during the interval of his visit and he got within walking distance of the apartment before the battery of his golf cart went dead.

14
    PROFESSOR OTTO RANKE sat in committee, his mind wandering, thinking of a recent headline in the
Observer:
GROUP DEBATES NAME OF COMMITTE . He had come to relish these proofs of student illiteracy. It was all he could do not to read the student paper with a correcting pencil.
Committee
was a word no member of the faculty was likely to misspell. How much of their time was spent, scattered around a table like this, discussing some interminable topic. This was a meeting of the college ethics committee and he was departmental representative involuntarily, having been appointed by Sencil after the chair had explained to him the refusal of junior members to do anything beyond the minimal for their exorbitant pay.
    “But committee work is part of the minimum.”
    “I wish I could convince them of it.”
    “Let me try.”
    “No, Otto, no.” The thought alarmed Sencil. He was in his forties and perhaps had some residual memory of a time when faculty taught twice as much as they did now and accepted academic tasks without complaint. Sencil’s cowardice meant that the senior member of the department was expected to carry water for his delinquent juniors. Of course he accepted. The habits of a lifetime were hard to break. He had lived to regret his acquiescence.
    Once, a student caught cheating was expelled without ceremony or hesitation. He had broken the sacred covenant that must obtain between teacher and student. Now, a professor brought his suspicions to this committee and they considered the case and acted as jury. They were not a hanging jury. The accused student routinely threatened to employ a lawyer. The level of proof had been raised to a point where it was virtually impossible to reach a guilty verdict. The criteria were no longer those of the academy, but of civil law. Still, complaints were brought and the committee sat.
    The room they met in was a windowed seminar room off the main corridor of DeBartolo. Passersby slowed and stared at them, puzzled, and then went on. Clearly this wasn’t a class and the members were so heterogenous, departmentally speaking, that their raison d’être was not obvious. An assistant dean was in the chair, a misanthrope who ignored male members and allowed sisters of her sex to preach endlessly. It didn’t matter. Futility engaged in by either gender was still futility. Ranke thought of his own suspicions of only a year ago, the Russell Bacon case. It was odd to think that it had been brought to his attention by Orion Plant. Now Orion had been cast into outer darkness, rightly, while Bacon sizzled along toward his doctorate. The young man was a charlatan and a cheat.
    The paper he had submitted to Ranke’s seminar on the tragic history of the Congregation of Holy Cross in New Orleans that had nearly led to a break between Notre Dame and the mother house in LeMans had been passable and not much else. It happened to be on the top of the pile when Orion had come for one of his infrequent consultations. The phone rang as they were talking and Ranke answered it. A bored Plant had pickedup the paper and read it. He was still holding it when Ranke finished the call.
    “Why are you keeping