The Man Burned by Winter (Rooker Lindström, #1)

by Pete Zacharias

Whitlock, and Martin Keene were clustered in the center of the room,

with Detectives Elias Cole and Millie Langston at opposite ends. Tess’s

“Three women,” Sterling spoke up. “Midtwenties to early thirties. All three white, blonde, between five feet three inches and five feet eight inches. Weight between one hundred twenty and one hundred sixty pounds.” Cole chimed in next. “No DNA from our killer left on the victims or the calling card. Bruising to the face, body, and buttocks. Nonfatal knife wounds on the torso and abdomen. Fatal knife incision—possibly a hunting knife—to the sternum. Damage to the vaginal wall.”

“You know how he killed his victims?” Suffocation. Then decapitation. Hunting knife.

“You detailed several killers, BTK being one. And another one, the Madman . . . You investigated whether their impulse to create art was innate or developmental. You referred to them as artists in their own right.”

They were sounds he couldn’t bear to hear again. He often thought about the detective, Eduardo Arroyave, who had put him in the crosshairs of his son’s killer.

He heard the guy resigned, probably couldn’t live with getting a little boy killed.

What she didn’t know was far darker: each night Gunner Lindström brought a woman home, he had hacked her head clean off while Evelyn was fast asleep next door.

a cold-blooded killer of women for close to a decade. He was the one thing Rooker hated most in this world.

He knew hope was a drug. Once it’s taken away, it’s damn near impossible to feel that high again.