The Savior’s Trap

Chapter Thirteen – The Pattern That Isn’t

Detective Norman Drake kept three photographs on the blotter, aligned like a grim triptych. Fluorescent light hummed above his desk; the old HVAC rattled as if the precinct were clearing its throat and refusing to speak. He had pushed his coffee to the very edge of the desk without realizing it. The ring it left behind bled into a map of old rings—a topography of long nights.

Three women. Three living rooms that could have been catalogs: soft throws, framed diplomas, neat stacks of books. Three bodies that suggested an exit chosen with deliberation. The angles were different; the ending was the same.

He didn’t look at faces long. He looked at the edges. The overwatered fern in one corner, the television remote placed carefully parallel to the coffee table edge in another, the candle guttered halfway down in the third. What the dead left tidy was as important as what they left behind.

The door opened with the weight of someone trying to make light of bad timing. Jason Macmillan shouldered in, a paper bag in one hand, two coffees in the other, his tie loosened in a way that made it look like an intentional choice rather than surrender.

“Brought sugar,” Jason said, setting a cup near the edge of the world and sliding the bag across. “Also brought judgment if you pretend you don’t take sugar.”

Drake made a show of ignoring the sugar and then, without looking up, tore two packets open. “Guilt tastes better sweet.”

“Noted.” Jason leaned over the desk, eyes flicking to the photos. His mouth stopped joking. “So that’s them.”

“Three,” Drake said. “Katherine Doyle, fifty-one. Laurel Heights. Found by a neighbor who went to borrow a ladder. Door was unlocked.” He tapped the second photo with a knuckle. “Melanie Ortiz, forty-three. Ridgewood. Housekeeper found her. Tuesdays and Thursdays, ten a.m. sharp. Body was cooling by the time she arrived.” He shifted to the third. “Anita Kravetz, forty-eight. Brook Hollow. Husband on a business trip, two kids in college. Relatives started texting when she didn’t pick up. Patrol did a wellness check. They broke a pane in the side door, cleared the house, found her in the den.”

“Notes?” Jason asked.

“Each one left a letter,” Drake said. He pulled three clear sleeves from a file and laid them next to the photographs. “Typed. Printed on home machines, far as we can tell. Each signed by hand.”

Jason scanned. Doyle’s note was two pages, dense paragraphs of apology and precise gratitude. Ortiz’s was three pages, a careful inventory of failures, a ledger balanced with regret. Kravetz’s was one page, clean and spare, the words neat enough to hurt. All three ended the same way: I am so sorry.

Jason hummed. “And all three—”

“Licensed psychologists.” Drake finished for him. “Private practice. No shared office space. No shared supervisor on paper. No common malpractice carrier, no easy crossovers on insurance panels. They’re in adjacent cities, but not the same referral networks that we can see at first glance.”

Jason pulled a chair with his foot and sat backward on it, forearms draped across the back. He was ten years younger than Drake and wore his cynicism like a jacket tied at the waist: useful but not yet beloved. “I read the preliminary from the ME,” he said. “Cause of death: Doyle and Kravetz—overdose, a lethal cocktail with benzos doing heavy lifting; Ortiz—carbon monoxide in a closed garage. Time of death staggered across two weeks, not the same day, not even the same weekend. If there’s a drumbeat, it’s not obvious.”

“And yet.” Drake pushed his coffee away and finally looked at the faces. The camera had been kind; it always was, during evidence collection. No tabloids here. The kindness made him angrier. “Three clinicians, three well-planned endings, three detailed apologies. In neighboring jurisdictions within fourteen days.”

Jason unsleeved one letter and tapped a finger over a line. “They’re detailed because the internet exists. People Google ‘how to write a proper goodbye’ now. I’ve seen worse. I’ve seen men leave logins to crypto accounts and women leave color-coded binders. These notes look like the ones you’d hope to find if you had to.”

“Hope,” Drake repeated, tasting the word as if it were foreign. “There’s something too clean about them.”

Jason took a long draw of coffee and grimaced. “Your coffee sucks and your instincts are twitchy. Classic Drake Monday.”

“It’s Thursday.”

“Classic Drake Thursday.”

Drake rifled through another folder, produced screenshots—the part of the evidence that made his skin itch. “All three recorded themselves,” he said. “Not live-streamed. Set up a phone, propped it on a stack of books or a tripod, pointed it at themselves, pressed record. We have copies from the devices. Each video shows the room for a few minutes, them talking to the camera—apologies, rehearsed—you can hear the printer in the background in one, as if the letter is still warming. Then they end the recording. After that… the act. Off-camera.”

Jason’s eyebrows rose. “They didn’t film that part?”

“No.” Drake’s jaw worked. “And the timing matters. The videos end. There’s a cut. Then nothing until the body’s found. We don’t have footage of the exact moment.”

“Because they kept it dignified. Or because someone else was there,” Jason said, letting the last option hang.

Drake nodded once. “Exactly.”

Jason drummed his fingers. “Let me play the boring angel. The Lieutenant says we’re drowning in open cases and swinging at shadows. Three women, similar ages, similar jobs, under similar stressors? The last two years have chewed people up. Maybe they didn’t know each other. Maybe the connection is the air we all breathed.”

“And they all decided to record apologies, in neat rooms, with their diplomas in frame?” Drake asked. “It’s not the suicides I doubt. It’s the choreography.”

Jason’s mouth tightened. He knew better than to dismiss choreography. They’d had a case two summers back where a burglar in nice shoes had staged his own break-ins to look like the house had politely fallen apart. People with a taste for control did their best work in arrangements.

“What about common phrases?” Jason asked, sliding the notes back. “People who copy templates end up using the same five sentences.”

“I thought of that,” Drake said. He flipped to the linguistic analysis he’d bullied out of IT. “We ran a basic frequency check. The apologies are verbose, but they’re written in the dead women’s voices—emails to family match tone and syntax. One echo, though: all three included a version of ‘This isn’t because of you; this is about something in me.’ Not unique, but neat.” He tapped the printed lines. “And all three used the phrase ‘I don’t want to be a burden’ twice. Same redundancy.”

Jason shrugged. “That’s common as dirt.”

“Common doesn’t mean coincidental,” Drake said softly.

Jason watched him a second longer and then conceded with a half-smile. “Okay, Detective Poetry. What do you need?”

“Patterns,” Drake said. “Not the obvious ones. The ones they touched without touching. Printer models. Paper brands. The exact font—one of these looks like it defaulted to Cambria but then someone went to Calibri on a second page; another used Times New Roman for the header, like an old template got pasted. Also: pharmacies. If two of them filled prescriptions at the same chain on the same day of the week, I want to know. And I want their calendars. Conferences, continuing ed. Clinicians share rooms even if they don’t share offices. Alumni groups, licensure boards, malpractice CLE seminars. Places they were told to be.”

Jason pulled a notebook, already writing. “We’ll need warrants or, at least, widower consent. The families—”

“Doyle had no partner,” Drake said. “Ortiz had a sister pressing her. Kravetz—husband’s cooperative because guilt makes people generous. He wants us to find a villain. I can’t promise him one.”

Jason turned a page. “Any clients in common?”

Drake shook his head. “Protected records. We’ll see what we can lawfully pry loose. But think tangential. Do they sit on the same referral listserv? Do they consult for the same rehab? Do they guest lecture at the same community college? Do their patients attend the same support groups?” He paused. “Do they lead them?”

Jason scribbled, then looked up. “You think this is about the job. Not the marriage, not the money, not the quiet.”

“They were trained to look at patterns in other people,” Drake said. “If someone wanted to get clever, he’d pick the ones who thought they’d see him coming.”

Jason leaned back in the chair and let his breath out through his nose. “Okay. But we still have a clock.” He glanced toward the glass wall of the bullpen, where the Lieutenant’s office glowed like an aquarium. “Three days,” he said. “Seventy-two hours to find a thread. If we don’t, the brass calls it for what it looks like and closes it. The city doesn’t want a serial anything right now. Funding is fragile. Headlines are poison.”

“The city never wants a serial anything,” Drake said. “Want doesn’t change the number of bodies.”

“Agreed. But if we push the wrong narrative and we’re wrong, we blow smoke into a lot of people’s living rooms.”

Drake rubbed his eyes. “We don’t need a narrative. We need one honest piece of string.”

Jason pointed his pen toward the third photo. “Anita’s the one with the husband away. Did he have an alibi?”

“Board meetings in Dallas. Flight records check; hotel key logs check; he’s got selfie time stamps with a sad Caesar salad. He looks like a man who wants someone else to tell him what to feel.” Drake paused. “He did mention something odd. Anita had started double-locking the doors in the last few months. She’d never done that before. She told him she’d gotten spooked. Wouldn’t say by what.”

“Stalkers?” Jason asked. “Any ring camera footage?”

“Nothing useful,” Drake said. “Cats, packages, very punctual mail.”

Jason chewed that. “What about their devices? DMs, forums, the usual doomscrolling? Did they join the same online group for clinicians? Did someone slide into their private messages with a ‘Tell me your worst, I’ll tell you mine’ and then keep going?”

“We’re pulling what we can under consent,” Drake said. “Ortiz’s sister gave us passcodes. Doyle’s laptop is old enough to have a fan that sounds like a tiny jet, but IT says it still tells the truth. Kravetz used cloud backups; her husband gave us permission.”

Jason nodded, then tilted his head. “What’s your gut say?”

“That if I could schedule despair, I wouldn’t pick three women with the same license in the same radius in the same month,” Drake said. “And I wouldn’t choreograph clean letters and careful recordings for all three unless I was selling neatness.”

Jason cracked a smile. “We’ve both worked scenes where neatness was the loudest noise in the room.” He stood, rolling his shoulders. “All right. Printers, paper, fonts, pharmacies, calendars, support groups, rehab consults, listservs, alumni, licensure trainings, guest lectures. I’ll divide and conquer with FIU. You take families. You’re better at soft voices and hard questions.”

“You’re better at talking to IT without making them hate us,” Drake said.

“True,” Jason said, unoffended. He thumbed his phone. “And, by the way, I already asked our in-house number-cruncher to run a network graph on clinicians in a fifty-mile radius. If three nodes light up near the same conferences, we’ll see it.”

Drake looked back at the photographs. He had never been superstitious, not in the way that meant knocking on wood or talking to dead rooms. But patterns had a smell, like rain about to happen. He could smell this one even if he couldn’t see it.

“Jason,” he said, as his partner reached the door.

“Yeah?”

“If there’s a fourth,” Drake said quietly, “no one is going to call it coincidence. Not even the brass.”

Jason’s face tightened. He nodded once, serious now in a way that sanded the youth off him. “Then let’s make sure there isn’t.”

The door clicked shut behind him. Drake sat back and let the hum of the precinct fold over him. He gathered the letters, slid them into a single folder, and clipped a note to the front: COMMON THREADS—LOOK SMALL.

His phone vibrated. An email from Records—one of the women had served, briefly, as a guest facilitator at a hospital group for compulsive s****l behavior two months ago. No names of participants attached. Confidential by policy.

He thought of the phrase support groups and underlined it on his pad until the ink began to pool.

Three days. Seventy-two hours. He picked up his coffee, cold now, and drank it anyway. Then he stood, slipped the folder under his arm, and went to ask people who hated him for favors they would give him because they hated other things more.

Behind him, the three photographs lay face down on the blotter, a temporary mercy he granted himself.

It lasted until he came back.