Dead of Winter Read Free

headed toward Manitou Outpost. The horses had gotten spooked. They separated briefly. Kennicot heard his wife scream, followed by an animal growl. Percy had searched the evergreen forest but found only Sakari’s fallen horse, its throat slashed. The killer had carried off Percy’s wife into the woods.
    Tom had told his men to be wary of a rogue trapper in the area or possibly a band of cutthroat Indians. None of the searchers seemed to like that he was in charge. To the soldiers and fur traders, Tom was the newcomer. The man from the city. But they were all scared ever since colonists from Fort Pendleton had started to go missing in the woods. A few weeks ago, a French Canadian hunter had been found disemboweled. Whether the colonists liked Inspector Hatcher or not, he had been hired to track down their killer.
    As Tom snowshoed through the woods, he wondered if leaving behind his city comforts had been the right decision. Montréal had been cold, but the interior of Ontario was constantly below zero. The blizzard’s endless breath seeped into his bones. White wisps puffed out of his chapped mouth. His cheeks and nose were numb, and he feared frost bite might eat away his face.
    How long can we survive out in this godforsaken weather?
    The rest of the search party, all colonists who spent their lives enduring such brutal winters, seemed to handle the cold just fine. He now envied their heavy fur parkas and otter skin boots. Just keep your body moving, Tom.
    The inspector led the search party forward, doing his best to keep Anika in his sights as the swift tracker crept like a wraith in the fog. She stopped and waved them over.
    Tom quickened his pace to catch up. She showed him a faint blood trail. There were more tracks, too. Deep impressions in the snow. They followed the tracks until they reached the frozen stream of Beaver Creek. They halted.
    “Great Scott!” Tom said.
    Suspended in the ice was the butchered body of Sakari Kennicot. But only the upper torso, it seemed. She had been disemboweled. Several ribs were exposed. And one arm had been completely severed at the shoulder.
    Percy Kennicot ran ahead of the pack, brushing past Tom. The dead woman’s husband fell to his knees and wailed like an animal.
    Seeing the remains of Sakari Kennicot, Tom’s mind flashed to images from his last case in Montréal: butchered bodies of women being dragged up from the harbor. Nothing but skeletons strung together by grey sinews. It was the grisly work of the most formidable killer Inspector Hatcher had ever tracked.
    The Cannery Cannibal.
    Just two years ago, Inspector Hatcher had worked in Montréal alongside British and French Canadian detectives to solve the case of the century. For over a year, the Cannery Cannibal had terrorized the harbor city, abducting dockside prostitutes who sold their bodies near the cannery district. The twisted things the killer had done to those girls. The way he butchered them, carving the flesh from their bones. The hair and skin on their heads had been left, as if the Cannery Cannibal couldn’t bring himself to cut up their faces. He left that meat to the fishes when he dumped the women’s skeletons into the water. Inspector Hatcher had found traces of white powder caked in the eye sockets.
    While trying to think like a killer, Tom had spent numerous nights imagining the cannibal carving up these women like a butcher flaying meat off an animal, leaving behind a skeleton with the woman’s head intact. It was only later, after he found the killer’s dockside lair, and final victim, that Tom discovered the beast made up the women’s faces like the powdery visages of Renaissance queens.
    Now Tom gripped a tree, trying to erase the memory. The wind shook clumps of snow off the nearby branches. He sensed he was being watched. Catching his breath, he scanned the forest to see if the Cannery Cannibal had somehow followed him to the backwoods of Ontario. But that was impossible, because the