Read "The Horror Expert" by Frank Belknap Long online for free on Textopian. Full text with search, annotations, highlights, and AI-powered reading aids.
Lieutenant of Detectives Joseph Fenton of Homicide West was remembering some of the others. The tragic and unusual cases, the sensational ones, the kind that stayed in the headlines for weeks and months and increased the circulation of newspapers from coast to coast by hundreds of millions of copies.
He sat staring down at his best lead so far, the only lead he could really sink his teeth into, wishing to hell he didn't have to remember. He drummed with his fingers on the desktop and hunched his shoulders a little. He was making a big mistake and he knew it. It was always a mistake to think back across the years when he had a job to do that called for a maximum of effort and concentration. It made him feel guilty and took the edge off his keenness. It was the worst kind of mistake but he kept on making it, because murder was always a shock to him.