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  HEARTBEATS OF A KILLER

  Copyright © Michael Merson 2019

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, nor translated into a machine language, without the written permission of the publisher.

  Condition of sale

  This book was sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it was published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  The moral right of the author had been asserted.

  This was a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events and organizations was purely coincidental.

  Cover Art and Formatting by Rebecca Garcia

  Prologue

  The ground under Tammy was hard. She couldn’t move, and her hands and her arms ached from the bindings that bound them together behind her back. She laid there naked looking through the tall pines at the Colorado moon that glowed brightly overhead. Her kidnapper pressed his body over and over again into hers.

  She was afraid, and she just wanted it to end. She no longer tried to fight him or persuade him to stop. He was determined to finish what he had started, and he had already hurt her when she’d tried to reason with him earlier. Her left eye was now swollen shut, her nose was surely broken, and she could still feel the blood running down the back of her neck from a wound somewhere on her head.

  As his breathing began to speed up, she closed her eyes and tried to understand why he was doing this. She thought she knew him, and Tammy felt that she was always nice to him, even when the other girls made fun of him behind his back.

  Was this my fault? Did I ask for this? Tammy asked herself.

  She knew he would be finished soon, and she hoped that he would leave her there in the woods.

  Tammy began to replay the events of the day in her mind. She remembered arriving at the mall for her shift at Landings Department Store. She then talked with Jennifer from the security office and later had dinner with her in the food court before Jennifer went on her trip to Las Vegas.

  She remembered seeing him walking through the mall and how he had awkwardly waved at her when she passed by. She was in the parking lot next to her car when he approached her, and that was all she could recall. The next thing she remembered was waking up in the backseat of his car, tied up.

  When he took her out of the backseat, she had tried to protest. That’s when he’d punched her in the eye and the nose. He then picked her up, placed her over his shoulder, and brought her up the trail to this spot.

  When he finished, he laid there on top of her for a moment. He then stood up, walked over to her clothes, and cleaned himself off with her shirt. Then he pulled his pants back up.

  Jeramiah was proud of what he had done, and as he stood there basking in the light of the moon, he felt exhilarated, powerful, and full of life. For the moment, he was the one in control. He was the one that was seen and admired. Once again, he had the power to decide between life and death.

  “Please let me go,” Tammy pleaded from a few feet away. Jeramiah turned around and looked at her. He then walked toward her and stood over her beaten and bloody body.

  “Do you love me?” He asked as he bent down and straddled himself over Tammy’s stomach.

  “I just want to go home!” She cried.

  “Shh,” Jeramiah whispered.

  “Please let me go,” Tammy begged.

  “I can't. You’re mine now,” Jeramiah declared just as he pulled his knife out from behind his back. The blade was large, and he admired it in the light of the moon while slowly dragging the tip softly over her bare chest.

  “I won’t tell anyone! Please just let me go!” Tammy begged and then cried out loud.

  “I can’t let you go. Your heart belongs to me now,” Jeramiah explained and then quickly pressed her head down hard onto the ground with his left hand while he ran the knife blade across her throat with his right.

  Tammy tried to breathe, but she could not. The airflow into her lungs had stopped. The blood pouring from her neck started to pool under her as she squirmed on the ground. Jeramiah stood up and backed away, watching intently as she fought for her life.

  Tammy rolled over onto her stomach, and to his surprise, she was able to stand. Tammy continued to fight for air as her blood streamed down her chest. Jeramiah shook his head from side to side. He walked over to her and punched her once more in the face. The impact sent her onto her back once more. Tammy did not attempt to stand again. She laid there on the ground, desperately pulling at her restraints to no avail. Jeramiah walked around her body, excitedly watching as his victim fought for her life. Then after she stopped moving, he turned her head and body downhill so that her blood would run away from him. Once again, Jeramiah straddled her and watched as the last bits of life left her body.

  “Now to get what’s mine,” Jeramiah said as he cut and then sawed through her chest to retrieve his prize.

  Jeramiah was just about to remove her heart when he heard the voices of a man and woman walking up the trail. He quickly moved into the brush and ducked down out of sight. Suddenly, a couple appeared and walked right up next to Tammy’s body.

  Jeramiah sat very quietly, not moving a muscle. The woman screamed out loud. Jeramiah panicked. He moved to his right, down the hill, and through the brush just as their flashlight skimmed past his hiding place. Unfortunately for Jeramiah, the only thing he left with was his precious tool in hand. Tammy’s heart remained with her.

  Chapter 1

  Sunday, July 1st

  3:00 AM

  It was three o’clock in the morning, and from a distance during the day, Pikes Peak served as a beautiful backdrop for the city of Colorado Springs. The famous mountain was the subject of many photos and paintings since its discovery. Sometimes the snow-capped mountain was used on a postcard for many of the city’s tourists. As he left the bright lights of the city streets behind him, he quickly found himself snaking his way through the many switchbacks of the mountainside that would eventually lead him to his destination.

  Detective Axel Frost was all too familiar with the area known as North Cheyenne Cañon Park. The vast foothills with its many hiking trails surrounding the Pikes Peak mountain region was an accessible playground for any outdoor enthusiasts with a pair of hiking boots or a mountain bike. This section of the foothills was littered with large evergreens that seemed to stretch endlessly upward until they peeked into a sea of blue skies during the day.

  North Cheyenne Cañon was populated with few residents whose homes were scattered throughout the mountainside. There were many trails for residents and visitors to hike that crisscrossed through the trees and eventually disappeared into and around the rolling hills and valleys. The entire area was part of Axel’s patrol sector when he was a rookie officer fresh out of the police academy. When he patrolled North Cheyenne Cañon, he always felt more like a park ranger than a police officer.

  Thoughts of those first unforgettable years on the department kept coming to mind as Axel circled around the familiar switchbacks one after another. As he continued his slow and steady climb up the gravel packed road, he remembered the many nights that he had found sexually charged teenagers parked in the darkness at one of the many overlooks. He never arrested the kids. After all, he was a teenager once.

  He recalled helping the many lost newbie hikers find their way back to their parked cars after they got lost in the forest. The newbies would get lost then fi
nd their way back to some unknown location on the main road where Axel would find them wandering around with no clue where they were. Axel thought that those years were a much simpler time in his career. Back then his only worries were the people who resided around North Cheyenne Cañon and those who visited it.

  Eventually, the winding road passed through tunnel one of the two tunnels in the mountain. There were three tunnels, but the third was closed off to traffic after it was determined to be unsafe. All the tunnels were rumored to be haunted. Some nights, usually around Halloween, high school kids would drive up to the tunnels and dare each other to walk all the way through the tunnel alone, in the dark, and without a flashlight. Some would make the trip through the tunnel and come back to their friends sharing their "ghost experience" while others never even made it halfway through the haunted tunnel.

  As he exited the first tunnel, Axel saw the bright floodlights in the distance, near the visitor’s center to Helen Hunt Falls. The busy police officers and news reporters brought him back to the current situation at hand. He was no longer a rookie patrolling North Cheyenne Cañon for teenagers or lost hikers; he was now a lead detective with the Colorado Springs Police Department who had a job to do. He slowed his car down as he drove past the mixture of marked and unmarked police cruisers lining the parking lot. He pulled into an open space and parked between two marked police cruisers numbered 1616 and 1620.

  As Axel climbed out of his car, he had to grip the door tightly to prevent the strong winds from pulling it from his hand and hitting the cruiser next to him. He shut the door quickly, stood straight up, stretched his arms into the sky, and then he swayed back and forth, mirroring the tall pines that surrounded him. Upon lowering his hands, Axel brought them to his face and wiped his eyes to wake himself a little more. He collected his flashlight, found his way past the parked cars to the entrance to the trail, and began to make his way up the mountainside. He was halfway up the trail when he found a large boulder to lean on to catch his breath.

  “I need more cardio,” he whispered.

  He wiped away the sweat that had accumulated on his forehead. Standing there briefly, he decided that he had made the right choice in wearing his hiking boots, but the wrong choice in not keeping up with his New Year’s resolution of more exercise. With each step, his hiking boots pressed into the loose gravel on the trail that took him deeper into the forest surrounding the mountain.

  The trail was littered with large boulders, rocks, and wooden posts that marked each mile on the trail. Axel’s pants and windbreaker whipped loudly as the westerly wind found its way through the army of trees across the rocky trail and blew past him as it continued down through the valley toward the city. Axel had grown up in Colorado, and he was all too familiar with the Colorado mountains and its unpredictable weather. The forecast for earlier in the day called for high temperatures followed by a warm evening that would eventually be cooled down by winds out of the west.

  The floodlights along the trail were bright, and his route to the crime scene was clearly visible; his flashlight remained at his side as he continued the gradual climb upward. As he walked around one bend in the trail, two uniformed officers passed by on the left side of him silhouetted only by the lights that illuminated the darkness behind them. He heard the two officers before he saw them, and he was able to make room on the trail for them by stopping and pressing himself up against the fence post marker. He deduced that they were part of an earlier shift and that the two of them had just been released from the crime scene by someone in Axel’s office. Their conversation, the small portion that Axel heard, centered on the amount of overtime they were making tonight and how much they had made this summer so far. He tried to reason for a moment at the awkwardness of their conversation about money while an innocent girl lay lifeless just a short distance away.

  Eventually, he found his way into an area just off the trail where through the shadows of the trees, he saw a familiar figure carefully squatting next to the victim on the ground. Gary, his partner, was wearing his all too familiar worn-out brown leather coat, blue jeans, brown leather boots, and one of his signature cowboy hats. As Axel moved closer, his shadow crossed over Gary and the victim’s naked body. Gary turned toward Axel and used his hand to block the floodlight shining just behind the two of them.

  “Her name was Tammy Johnson, and before this evening she lived on Simmons Road in the ‘rich’ part of town. I think that’s who she is based on the identification we found,” Gary said softly as he slowly turned away from the bright light back toward the victim. Axel knew that the ‘rich’ part of town, which Gary referred to, was the Woodlake Estates Neighborhood Community.

  “Do you stay up at night waiting for that cell phone to ring or what?” Axel asked as he moved in closer for a better look.

  “Yes, I do. Don’t you?” Gary said as he continued to look over the victim.

  Gary had been Axel’s partner for more than ten years, and he was a wise man. Axel had learned a great deal from him over the years. Axel was close to Gary, and his wife, Carol. He even spent some Christmas evenings and other family holidays at their home. They treated the lonely thirty-eight-year-old bachelor like a brother or as Carol liked to put it, an adopted son, but truth be told Gary and Carol weren't old enough to be his parents.

  Gary had passed the recommended age of retirement years ago, but he continued to stay on the department and work one homicide right after another. He had worked for more chiefs than any one cop on the payroll, and he always let the new police chiefs know that he held "badge one" in the department. Personally, Axel thought that Gary stayed on the job just to piss the brass off whenever he got the opportunity. He wasn’t known for having a filter when it came to saying what he was thinking.

  Axel squatted down, careful not to disturb anything just behind Gary and listened as his partner filled him in on the victim, who he had presumably already identified.

  “I got the name from the purse I found over there,” Gary explained as he pointed toward a pile of clothes and other personal belongings that were lying near the victim while he held the victim’s license in his other hand.

  Axel looked at the picture on the license after Gary handed it to him and realized that it wasn’t going to be much help in identifying the victim. The girl in the picture that he was looking at was a happy, smiling sixteen-year-old who had just passed her driver’s test. The girl on the ground was beaten, bloodied, and covered in dirt.

  While Gary spoke, Axel looked down at the lifeless form and tried to imagine her preparing herself for prom just a few short months ago. For a moment, he imagined her at the mall with her girlfriends scouring the racks for that perfect dress. Not just any dress, but that special one. The dress that would set her apart from the other girls at the dance. The dress that would keep the attention of the young man who was lucky enough to have escorted her on that particular night. For a few seconds, he imagined her dress and the color she had chosen, and for a brief moment, he allowed a slight smile to form across his face as he thought about the happier occasion. But, just as quickly as the smile appeared, it disappeared. Axel brought himself back to the current situation. It wasn’t a joyous occasion. This was a cold, premeditated murder.

  Tammy’s torn and cut clothes were next to a Colorado blue spruce that swayed back and forth as the wind blew through its branches. It was evident that Tammy was a popular girl and was probably preparing to go away to college in the fall. The designer labels from her clothes and her manicured fingernails supported the fact that she was from a financially well-off family.

  Tammy, like the other victims, had a deep cut in her throat and one down her chest. She lay flat on her back with her head pointing downhill. It was reminiscent of a method that hunters used to help expedite the flow of blood from a recent kill. The only difference between Tammy and the other victims was that her heart appeared to be where it should be, in her chest. Axel assumed that the killer was interrupted before he’d had the chance to
retrieve his trophy.

  Tammy’s arms and wrist were tied behind her back, and Axel recognized the familiar brown rancher’s rope used to subdue her. It was the same type used in all of the other murders as well. The rope was a small detail that was discovered after the second body was found in the woods a few months ago. Unfortunately, the rope itself wasn’t unique, and it could be purchased at most any hardware store, but all of the lengths of rope that were collected were positively identified as being from the same roll of brown rope.

  One piece of rope remained a few feet away from Tammy. At one time it undoubtingly bound her long legs at the ankles; it was cut away after she was carried here. Axel didn’t need the autopsy report to tell him what he already knew. Like some of the other victims, Tammy was alive when she arrived here, and it was here that she was sexually assaulted, and then killed. The rope that once bound her ankles was cut away only to facilitate the killer’s twisted fantasy of sexual domination.

  The crime scene was very much like the others. Axel continued to look over the entire scene looking for anything unusual. He moved through the different aspects of the murder in his mind trying to recreate the events that had taken place.

  She was over there at first. Then somehow, she ended up here. There’s blood around her neck, on her chest, and on her feet. Axel thought to himself. Wait!

  “Look at the area below her chest,” Axel said out loud to Gary.

  “What am I supposed to be looking at?” Gary asked.

  “There is a void.”

  “A void?” Gary asked.

  “Yeah. It’s like a ‘V’ where blood should be,” Axel explained as he pointed over Tammy’s body.

  “I see it. What do you make of that?”

  “I think he sat on top of her and cut her throat. The blood spurted out onto her chest and his thighs, his knees, and maybe his chest leaving the void around her abdomen.”