The Savior’s Trap

Chapter Thirty-Nine – Bingo

The phone rang just as Norman was pinning the third photograph back onto the corkboard. He grabbed the receiver with the same weary reflex as lighting a cigarette, his eyes still fixed on the lines he had drawn across the board.

“Detective Drake,” he answered, voice flat.

A man’s tone came back, strained, edges frayed like paper left in the rain. “My name is Alan Grayson. My wife—” he swallowed hard, the pause of a man who still hadn’t grown used to past tense—“my wife was one of them. Doctor Grayson. They said she killed herself. I—” His voice cracked. “I went through her things this morning. I shouldn’t have. But I found something strange.”

Norman sat down slowly, pen already in hand. “Strange how?”

“It was a receipt,” Alan whispered. “From a place called Elysium. A strip club, I think. My wife… she never went to places like that. She hated even the idea of them. And the receipt—” His breath hitched. “It was dated only three weeks before she… before it happened.”

Norman’s pen scratched across the notepad. Elysium. He underlined it twice. “You’re sure it was hers? Her card?”

“Yes,” Alan said, a sob leaking into the single word. “Her name, her card. I just don’t understand. She never told me. Never…”

Norman let the silence breathe for a moment, the kind that allowed grief its dignity. “Mr. Grayson, thank you for calling. I know this wasn’t easy. Hold onto the receipt. Someone from our office may need to collect it.”

Alan made a faint noise of acknowledgment before the line clicked dead.

Norman set the receiver down carefully, then turned toward the corkboard. Three women’s faces stared back at him, their smiles frozen in photos meant for professional bios, not obituaries. Beneath them stretched the black lines he’d drawn, tracing patterns that only he seemed to see. He picked up a red marker, uncapped it with his teeth, and in block letters scrawled ELYSIUM beside Dr. Grayson’s photo.

Then he stepped back and studied it. The other two lines—Dr. Patel and Dr. Monroe—remained blank at the edges. He lifted the marker again and drew small question marks beside them, the ink bright against the beige cork.

The office door opened, and Jason McMillan entered with a coffee in each hand, his tie crooked and his expression skeptical as always. “You look like a mad professor, Norman. Lines, symbols, question marks… what’s next? Tarot cards?”

“Better,” Norman said, his voice tight with suppressed energy. “Patterns.”

He gestured toward the board. “Husband of Grayson just called. Found a receipt. Elysium strip club. Three weeks before her death.”

Jason set the coffees down and leaned in, brow furrowing. “Elysium? Doesn’t sound like her crowd.”

“Exactly,” Norman replied. He capped the marker with a snap. “I want you to run card records for Monroe and Patel. See if the name Elysium pops. Even one stray transaction.”

Jason rubbed his face. “Norman, you know how hard it is to get financials without a warrant. And the brass—”

“I don’t care about the brass.” Norman’s voice sharpened, slicing through the stale air of the office. “If all three of them walked into the same building before they broke? That’s our link. That’s the opening.”

Jason sighed, already pulling his phone from his pocket. “Fine. I’ll call in a couple of favors.”

Norman turned back to the board, uncapped a black marker this time, and drew a new line branching downward from the others. A fourth track, empty at its end. Slowly, deliberately, he wrote E. CHASE at the tip.

Jason looked up, startled. “Hold on. You just put Elena Chase up there? The doc you were talking to?”

“She fits,” Norman said quietly. His eyes traced the name like a blade tracing a vein. “Therapist. Group sessions. Same type, same age bracket. And tell me you don’t see it—she carries it. That exhaustion. That tremor beneath the surface. She’s walking the same wire they did.”

Jason frowned. “Or she’s just tired of dealing with perverts in group therapy. Happens to the best of them.”

“Maybe.” Norman didn’t sound convinced. He drew a circle around her name and connected it with a dashed line to the red Elysium.

Jason’s phone buzzed. He stepped aside, murmured into the receiver, then hung up with an arched brow. “Guess what? Monroe’s husband never mentioned it, but she and Patel went to Elysium once with a group of colleagues. Called it a girls’ night. He brushed it off as harmless. No one thought it mattered.”

Norman felt the heat rise in his chest. He lifted the red marker again and scrawled BINGO across the board in block letters so large they cut through the web of lines.

Jason whistled low. “So all three of them set foot in the same strip club within months of their deaths. That’s… not nothing.”

“No,” Norman said, stepping back, his eyes narrowing. “That’s everything.”

The room seemed to tighten around the board, as if the women’s photos leaned closer, their silent faces demanding answers.

Jason crossed his arms. “So what’s the play? You going to waltz into Elysium and ask for the suicide package?”

Norman’s jaw flexed. “I’m going to waltz in and see what’s there. Smell the air, watch the dancers, listen to the people who think no one’s listening.” He tapped Elena’s name once with the cap of his marker. “If this place is the first domino, I want to know why. And I want to know why she’s still standing when the others fell.”

Jason gave him a long look. “Careful, Norm. You’re starting to sound obsessed.”

Norman’s gaze didn’t waver from the board. “Maybe obsession’s the only thing keeping me from missing the pattern.”

The rain outside thickened, drumming against the windows. In the dim light, the red letters BINGO glared back at them like a warning.