The Savior’s Trap

Chapter Thirty-Five – Patterns on the Wall

Detective Norman Drake stood with a dry-erase marker in his fist and the kind of stillness that only came from too many hours without blinking. His office hummed with fluorescent fatigue. The vent rattled in the ceiling like an old man clearing his throat. Coffee had burned itself into the air—yesterday’s brew reheated one time too many—layered over the iron tang of whiteboard solvent and the memory of paper. Files slumped across his desk in tired stacks; corners feathered; tabs bent from being pulled and pushed and pulled again. The green desk lamp wore a crack in its shade like a healed wound. Two pushpins on the corkboard behind him held nothing at all, as though something had escaped.

On the whiteboard he’d drawn three vertical lines, each slightly different in length, like three ribs beneath thin skin. At the base of each, he’d fixed a photograph with blue painter’s tape—no thumbtacks in the board, never again after the time he’d stabbed his own finger. Three faces: women mid-laughter at a picnic, a headshot from a clinic brochure, a candid at a conference microphone. Under the first two he’d written in block letters: 2 MONTHS. Under the third: 2.5 MONTHS.

He added crossbars up each line, step marks carved into the descent. Next to each crossbar he printed symptoms until the board filled with a language he’d learned to trust more than testimony: withdrawn from colleagues… doubled caseload in final month… sleep disturbance reported… door locked when it never used to be… startle response… decaf switch… last-minute cancellation of individual sessions… new referrals requested to CSB specialists… “delicate case”. Certain phrases sported circles so thick they looked like bruises.

Norman stepped back, capped the marker and recapped it again, a nervous metronome. The photos fought his habit of distance. He recognized one woman from a continuing-ed seminar three years ago—she’d asked a sharp question about shame and language; he’d admired the way she held the room without apologizing. Another he only knew from her obituary, the kind PR people write for families with too much to carry; the article had quoted a patient calling her a “quiet compass.” The third had an old video online of a panel on trauma; she’d sat still while two men interrupted each other and then said one sentence that made the room stop moving. He had watched it twice. He’d thought of her son’s posture at the funeral when the camera panned.

His marker knocked against the board with a hollow tick. “This isn’t random,” he said to the empty room. “This is choreography.”

“Talking to yourself again?” Jason Macmillan leaned in the doorway, blazer open, tie loosened to that exact inch detectives learn from television and habit. He held a paper cup that steamed, the lid creased like someone had worried it. “I thought the Vargas burglary ring was your morning dance partner.”

“Vargas can box-step without me for one hour.” Norman didn’t turn from the board. He touched the second photo with the marker cap, then the third. “Look at the intervals. Two months, two months, two and a half. Look at the slope—different terrain, same grade. Look at the notes. They didn’t just fall. Someone walked them downhill.”

Jason exhaled through his nose. “Patterns are not handcuffs, Drake. We get paid for evidence, not for the spidey sense you keep polishing on that board.”

Norman pointed to referrals to CSB specialists… “delicate case”… two days before. “You think it means nothing that she asked for help outside her lane and refused a consult? That one locks her office for the first time in ten years? That another sits in her car for ten minutes not turning the key, then brings muffins for admin like an apology for being human?”

Jason shifted his weight. “I think it means burnout. Compassion fatigue. Therapists are people too. Sometimes they break. It’s ugly, but it isn’t magic.”

The door behind Jason opened wider, and the temperature in the room shifted as if someone had cracked a window in January. Chief Daniels filled the doorway—barrel-chested, tie knotted in permanent irritation, eyes like new steel. He took in the whiteboard in a single sweep and stopped moving.

“What in God’s name am I looking at?” His voice arrived before he did, bark edged with bewilderment. He stepped inside, shut the door with a click that sounded like a verdict. “Three closed self-harm cases pinned on my wall like you’re auditioning for a true-crime documentary. And you—” he aimed a flat palm at Norman— “are on the clock for Vargas.”

Jason straightened. “Chief—”

“Save it.” Daniels’ stare pinned Norman. “Explain why, when I am down two detectives on medical, one on suspension for punching a suspect, and three more working doubles to keep our response times from getting us roasted at the council meeting, I find my senior man drawing little timelines for cases the coroner signed off on.”

Norman took the glare and didn’t look away. “Because these three lines are the same story told at different speeds.”

“Oh for—” Daniels tilted his head at the board. “Stories don’t get you warrants.”

“Patterns get you suspects,” Norman said, carefully even. “Two months, two months, two and a half. Each woman withdraws, each doubles her groups, each starts flinching at knocks, each produces a note tidy enough to frame, each dies in a way that forgives the living. The steps aren’t identical, but they rhyme. Someone is composing that rhyme.”

Jason’s mouth flattened. “You’re alleging a puppeteer of therapists. We don’t have a shred.”

“We have fingerprints you can’t dust,” Norman said. He tapped overwork doubled with the marker’s cap. “I’ve stood in too many kitchens to mistake this. Despair leaves patterns like hands leave prints on glass. These three wore the same internal bruising—high-functioning until they weren’t, isolating under the banner of responsibility, then neat apologies that read like confessions coached by a script.”

Daniels gave a low, incredulous chuckle that wasn’t amused. “You hear yourself? You want me to march into a judge’s chambers and say: ‘Your honor, my guy drew three lines and got a feeling’?” He lifted a hand, fingers splayed. “I’ve got a staffing crisis, a mayor screaming about clearance rates, and a union ready to string me up if I pull another body off rotation. We are not hunting ghosts.”

“Then call this a draft,” Norman said. He crossed the room and set the marker on his desk so he would stop weaponizing it. “Give me nights. Off the clock. I’ll dig for a thread we can hold in court. If there’s nothing, I shut up and take Vargas and the six next Vargas after that. But if there’s something and we ignore it, the fourth line on that board gets a date, and we all hang it on the wall in our heads whether we like it or not.”

Daniels’ eyes went back to the board despite himself. The photos had a way of clawing past policy. His gaze snagged on one note: after-hours visitor, “polite, forgettable,” asks to leave a note, twice. The corner of his mouth twitched. He drifted closer, not trusting his feet but following them anyway. He read decaf switch and snorted. “That’s a tell now?”

“For a woman who brewed jet fuel for twenty years and called it courage?” Norman said. “It’s not the switch. It’s the day she made it, and the hands that shook when she poured. Ask the receptionist.”

Daniels stared another beat. The fluorescent hum grew louder as if trying to fill the room’s indecision. Outside, a phone rang and gave up. Somewhere down the hall, someone swore softly at a copier.

“I don’t have the bodies,” Daniels said at last, heavy with the truth of it. “I’ve got rookies desk-riding with files up to their ears. I’ve got veterans doing door knocks that should be done by a team. Every hour you spend on this wall is an hour somebody waits longer for a call back. You see my bind?”

“I do,” Norman said. He meant it. He also meant to win. “That’s why I’m not asking for bodies. I’m asking permission not to get fired for caring out loud.”

Daniels’ jaw worked. He looked like a man trying not to acknowledge that something on the board had moved him an inch. He stabbed a finger at the third line. “Two and a half months. Why longer?”

“Different resistance,” Norman said. He felt an odd relief at the question—engagement instead of dismissal. “Different counterweights. You can push a person toward the edge, but the angle changes with the life they’ve built. This one fought and lost slower.”

“Or maybe she was sicker longer,” Daniels said, pushing back out of habit. But his stare had lost some heat. He paced once, twice, as if wearing grooves into a decision.

Finally, he stopped, exhaled through his nose with ferocious resignation. “Here’s what you get, Drake: unofficial latitude. Off hours. You do not touch Vargas on my clock with dirty hands from your hobby. You do not pull reports you don’t have rights to. You do not run surveillance, you do not requisition tech, you do not say the word ‘task force’ in a building with windows. You want to talk to grieving families on your own time, you be the one to knock on their doors. If you bring me a thread I can explain to the DA without sounding like I just joined a forum, I’ll pull it. Until then, you are a rumor. Am I clear?”

Norman nodded once. It was both less and more than he’d hoped. “Crystal.”

Daniels glanced at Jason. “Keep him out of jail. Or at least out of my office.” He turned back to the board one last time, and the part of his face that wasn’t a chief softened, quick and private. “And God help me—if that pattern is real, find it before it finds someone else.” He yanked the door open and left on a wake of authority and exhaustion.

Silence reasserted itself. The vent rattled. The marker on Norman’s desk rolled until it kissed a manila folder and stopped.

Jason let out a breath he’d been pretending not to hold. “Congratulations,” he said around the rim of his cup. “You just volunteered to do a full-time job for free.”

Norman picked up the marker, then set it down again before he cracked the cap. He looked at the three faces whose names he no longer had to read to remember. “I’d pay for it,” he said.

Jason’s brows tipped. “You know this is a trap, right? If you come up empty, he gets to say he humored you and you wasted your time. If you pull something that looks like misconduct, you own it alone.”

Norman gave a short, humorless smile. “Sounds like most relationships I’ve had.”

Jason snorted despite himself and came in, closing the door with his heel. He stood shoulder to shoulder with Norman in front of the whiteboard, both men reflected faintly in the glossy white, two ghosts reading tea leaves.

“What’s first?” Jason asked.

“Map the overlaps that aren’t obvious,” Norman said. “Vendors, continuing-ed seminars, referral networks. The ‘polite, forgettable’ type who leaves notes at front desks. Any strip of city where two of them might have walked the same sidewalk in the same week. And the children—both in college. Kids often become couriers for bad news, but they sometimes become carriers for good clues.”

Jason took a cautious sip. “You’re going to talk to families. Off the books.”

“Yes.” Norman kept his eyes on delicate case and saw it flicker with implication. “And colleagues. The ones who notice health by how the coffee is poured.”

Jason grunted. “I’ll keep Vargas warm.”

“Keep Vargas alive,” Norman said. “Warrants for the pawn guy before he dumps inventory. You’re better at the dance.”

Jason shook his head, half-amused, half-concerned. “You know, one day you’re going to have to learn how to half-ass things like the rest of us.”

“When I do,” Norman said, “write it in your calendar. It’ll be a holiday.”

Jason started for the door, then paused. His tone softened, a friend stepping out from behind a partner. “Be careful, Norm. If you’re right, whoever did this is careful too.”

Norman nodded without breaking his stare from the board. “Careful men make mistakes,” he said. “They think patterns make them invisible.”

Jason left. The door shut with a gentle, almost polite click.

Norman stood alone again in the hum and stale coffee and old ink. He uncapped the marker and wrote, beneath the shortest line, a single word: PRESSURE. Beneath the second: DESIGN. Beneath the longest: RESISTANCE. He boxed all three and drew a thin arrow beneath them pointing to empty space where a fourth timeline would not exist if he could help it.

He set the marker down, reached for the top file on the left-hand stack—the one with a tab he’d labeled, in his own cramped hand, GLORIA – ADMIN NOTES—and slid a legal pad in front of him. The vent coughed. The lamp hummed. Somewhere beyond his door, a printer rattled off a life in pages.

“Let’s see who’s pulling,” he said to no one at all, and began.