"Stephen Goldin - Herds" - читать интересную книгу автора (Goldin Stephen)

Pigs" on one wall. As a final gesture, he severed the telephone
line with a decisive slash. Then he placed the knife down on the
floor beside her body, at the same time picking up the note she
had written him about her divorce intentions. He put the note in
his pants pocket.

He stood up and looked himself over. His hands and clothes
were liberally smeared with blood. That would never do. He
would have to get rid of it somehow.

He scrubbed his hands well in the sink until he'd removed all
traces of the blood. He looked around the room and spotted
something that caught his breath: his personally printed
matchbook sitting on the table by the ashtray. He strode over to
it, thinking that it would be very foolish to leave a clue like that
lying around for the police to find. He slipped the matchbook
neatly into his pocket.

Then he went to his suitcase and took out a fresh suit of
clothes. He quickly changed into them, thinking as he did so that
he could bury his old clothes someplace a mile away so that
they'd never be found. Then he could come back here and
pretend to have discovered the body as it was. Since the phone
wires were cut, he would have to drive somewhere else to call the
police. The nearest neighbor with a phone, he recalled, was
about two miles away.

Stoneham turned and surveyed his handiwork. Blood was
smeared all over the floor and on some of the furniture, the body
was dismembered in particularly gruesome fashion, the radical
message was inscribed on the wall in plain view. It was a scene
out of a surrealistic nightmare. No sensible killer would have
performed a butchery like that. Blame would instantly fall on
that hippie commune, maybe on Polaski himself. It would serve
two purposes: cover up his guilt and rid San Marcos once and for
all of those damned hippies.

There was a shovel in a small toolbox outside the cabin.
Stoneham took it and walked off into the woods to bury his
clothes. Since there had been no rain for months, the ground was
dry and hard-packed; he left no footprints as he walked.
***

It did not take long for the bigger creature to kill the smaller.
But after it was done, the killer seemed immobilized by its own
actions. Gingerly, Garnna reached out a mental feeler and
touched the killer's mind. The thoughts were a jumble of
confusion. There were still swirling traces of anger, but they
seemed to be fading slowly. Other feelings were increasing. Guilt,
sorrow, fear of punishment; these were all things that Garnna