Project Gutenberg's Nor Iron Bars a Cage...., by Gordon Randall Garrett

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Title: Nor Iron Bars a Cage....

Author: Gordon Randall Garrett

Illustrator: Schoenherr

Release Date: January 2, 2010 [EBook #30832]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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Transcriber's Note:

This etext was produced from Analog Science Fact & Fiction May 1962.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright
on this publication was renewed.

NOR IRON BARS A CAGE....

Iron bars do not confine a Man--only his body. There are
more subtle, and more confining bindings, however....

JONATHAN BLAKE MACKENZIE

ILLUSTRATED BY SCHOENHERR

* * * * *

Her red-blond hair was stained and discolored when they found her in
the sewer, and her lungs were choked with muck because her killer
hadn't bothered to see whether she was really dead when he dumped her
body into the manhole, so she had breathed the stuff in with her last
gasping breaths. Her face was bruised, covered with great blotches,
and three of her ribs had been broken. Her thighs and abdomen had been
bruised and lacerated.

[Illustration]

If she had lived for three more days, Angela Frances Donahue would
have reached her seventh birthday.

I didn't see her until she was brought to the morgue. My phone chimed,
and when I thumbed it on, the face of Inspector Kleek, of Homicide
South, came on the screen. His heavy eyelids always hang at half mast,
giving him a sleepy, bored look and the rest of his fleshy face sags
in the same general pattern. "Roy," he said as soon as he could see my
face on his own screen, "we just found the little Donahue girl. The
meat wagon's taking her down to the morgue now. You want to come down
here and look over the scene, or you want to go to the morgue? It
looks like it's one of your special cases, but we won't know for