The Book of Kills by Ralph McInerny Read Free Book Online Page B

failure to come back with word filled him with foreboding.
    When the chancellor and his party left the box, they moved swiftly to the lower level and there, in a room reserved for security forces, the officers of the university confronted the halftime Indian. He sat in the brightly lighted room on a stool, a blanket draped around his shoulders. The paint on his body had been smeared in the struggle to take him into custody. He looked with manic cheerfulness at the administrative party. Ballast had been questioning him without result.
    “He won’t say who he is.”
    “Has he no identification?”
    “Where would he carry it?”
    Mrs. Noonan had begun to weep. Something was very wrong and she did not know what it was, only that her husband had missed half the game and nobody knew where he was. Miss Trafficant tried unsuccessfully to console her.
    “Where is Mr. Noonan?” the chancellor demanded of the captured Indian.
    “Would that be High Noonan?”
    It is a serious offense against Canon Law to strike a priest; the traffic in the opposite direction is murkier. It was all the chancellor could do not to slap the smirking face of the captive. Once the highest officers of this institution would have been able to recognize any student, but neither the chancellor nor anyone in his party knew who this lad was. Of course, none of them came into regular contact with students.
    “What should we do with him?” a security person asked Ballast, switching her ponytail as she did.
    “Is he under arrest?”
    “We don’t have the authority to arrest anyone, not properly.”
    And so, perforce, the South Bend police were called and the cat was, or soon would be, out of the bag. The chancellor took his party to the Morris Inn, the campus hotel, in awaiting limousines. He wished he were going to his room and to his bed where he could pull the covers over his head and curse the day he had been plucked from the ranks to his present eminence. At the Morris Inn they found both Noonan and Father Anselm. Some time before, they had been pushed into the lobby, cloth sacks tied over their heads, hands bound behind them, stripped to the waist. Their bodies had been painted, with especial attention paid to the scar left by Noonan’s open heart surgery.

11
    ORION PLANT HAD SPENT the day of the football game in company with his wife, Marcia, and a graduate student in mathematics named Byers. Neither of them knew that he was establishing his alibi. He himself had had no direct contact with the man named Hessian, a mercenary in any case who was exhibitionist enough to accept the role assigned him. He thought it was a spoof, and any small reluctance he might have felt was swept away by the mention of national television. Byers had no knowledge of that particular event. Laverne had assumed the job of recruiting Hessian with dedicated loyalty and she, he was sure, would be quiet as the grave even under torture. He still had not told Marcia that he was no longer a graduate student and that now they must survive on her salary from the Huddle.
    Disappointment at his dismissal had long since given way to satisfaction, as if he had deliberately arranged his own departure. He felt free. He was no longer in thrall to the pedantic demands of academic research. He had not wasted much time on his approved project, not since he had stumbled upon what Leone had called his crusade. What Orion referred to, not facetiously, as the Younger archives had set him on the path that would take him on to glory. Whatever the outcome of his efforts, the name Orion Plant was assured of a permanent place in the annals of Notre Dame.
    The bedroom that had been occupied by Mrs. Younger before she took refuge with a married son in San Diego had been converted into a war room of research. A plain table sat among the cabinets holding the records of Younger Real Estate, but Orion’s attention had been concentrated on papers that dated from the nineteenth century. There he had come