Always Love a Villain on San Juan Island by Sandy Frances Duncan, George Szanto Page B

the twelve-year-old winner of a civic oratory contest in Marysville, Tennessee. Morsely’s Beck had yet to make his mark, at least on Google.
    On to plagiarism. Hundreds of hits, maybe thousands. Remarkable. A high proportion of the early ones were for downloadable software, which would help a student discover if the paper he or she were submitting had been plagiarized, either because the student hadn’t realized she was stealing the intellectual property of others by copying too much while doing research—hard to believe, but Noel had seen a couple of young reporters do just that—or because the student had bought a paper and needed to know if it was stolen from elsewhere rather than the invention of the so-called author who’d sold it to him. Several of the sites allowed Noel to paste in the text he might be wondering about, click search, and within seconds the site would seek out word phrases in the published material it had on file, both original electronic texts and print matter that had been copied electronically. One site claimed it had seven billion items in its memories. Noel googled plagiarism again, found two dozen sites that would allow him to download, chose what looked like a large organization—Viper, which claimed their search engine had been used by the Miami New Times to check out Gerald Posner’s prose when they suspected him of plagiarism; good enough for Noel. He found the working page he needed and typed in the two opening sentences of Beck’s novella. Please wait, the screen told him.
    How speedy would Viper be? He waited, watching a small line pulse across the screen, for about twenty seconds. A message appeared:
    Strong matches 0.
    Weak matches 3.
    Click here.
    He clicked. Three paragraphs appeared, some words matching the words in Beck’s story but in different strings, bearing no relation to “Piper Blues.” He tried another site, aplagueonplagiarism.com. Same phrases, similar results. Helpful only in proving that if plagiarism was involved, neither Viper nor Plague had found it. Or, to be honest, that Noel hadn’t figured out how to use either search engine properly. He’d try again later.
    He locked the house and drove to Friday Harbor, where he’d spotted a bakery. He bought two croissants, they’d keep him till bacon-and-eggs time, and returned to the Morsely campus. Up the perfectly tended drive, now parking as Peter had suggested in back of the Mansion. Up the handsome staircase to Peter’s office with forty-five minutes to spare before Beck showed up.
    Today Peter wore a tweed sport jacket over a dress shirt, a blue-and-red-striped tie, and likely the same jeans. He noted Noel checking him out. “Staff meeting at noon.”
    â€œAh.” Professor Langley was quick.
    He offered coffee, which Noel refused. “Here’s the novella,” Peter said, handing him the sheaf. He got up from his desk and with a grand gesture, said, “And here is my brain. Internet Explorer is what I use; just click it and you’re on your way.” He started for the door.
    â€œI don’t want to kick you out—” Noel began.
    â€œNeed to have a brief conference with a colleague, no problem.”
    â€œWhere does Beck work?”
    â€œOh. Yeah, the Wild Pacific. Mostly seafood. Semi-upscale.”
    â€œAnd did you get me names of his friends?”
    â€œOne Tom Fergusson and another, Spider Jester.” He laughed when he saw Noel’s face. “Yeah, I know, but that’s apparently his real name.”
    â€œWhat some parents do to their children.”
    â€œI’ll try to run down their addresses when I get back.”
    â€œNo rush.” Noel figured he’d be able to find where they lived more quickly and less visibly than Peter. “Oh, Beck’s restaurant. Worth eating at?”
    â€œYeah, it’s good.”
    â€œMy partner Kyra Rachel is coming in this