Chapter Text
His apartment was a mess. It looked like a burglar had already sacked the place. If this wasn’t the home of Special Agent Peter Strahm, she’d say there were signs of potentially dangerous mental deterioration: the clothes strewn out on the floor, the cupboards hanging wide open, the completely barren refrigerator, the fist-sized crack in the wall, the bloodied gauze in the trash, the missing bureau-issued gun from his bedside drawer.
It wasn’t a good look for an agent who had managed to make himself a person of interest in the very case he was investigating.
The police hadn’t arrived at the scene yet; Lindsey had been quick, even if her body was still slow-moving from her time in the hospital, face all numbed, feeling alien and packed with cotton balls. She was supposed to stay completely out of the city and remain horizontal in her bed, playing dead until further notice. But when she heard Erickson put an APB out on her partner, she had decided to unofficially resurrect herself and use the spare key given her to sneak in. The place had always been beige and spartan and what she might consider a divorcee’s bachelor pad—but it was usually neat, too.
She had taken this same drive to his apartment enough times that it felt like she wasn’t breaking protocol, like she wasn’t driving around while unofficially deceased. It felt like it could have been years earlier, heading over just to rent a low budget 80s action movie, make fun of it, and eat cheap takeout on the couch.
The paperwork she signed said that she wasn’t supposed to be driving, legally too loopy on pain meds to operate a vehicle, face heavily bandaged like a piss-poor excuse for a children’s Halloween mummy, but there was no other option at this point. Perez knew well enough when someone went missing while working on the Jigsaw case the writing was on the wall.
If she hadn’t made that terrible mistake, if she hadn’t let Erickson convince her to play dead, then she would have been there with him. They had been partners for nearly five years, since she was fresh out of the academy, and she had always been the one whose life seemed to be on the line. Peter protected her and showed her the ropes and worked patiently with her in every step of the way. Time and time again. Time and time again.
So now she needed to conquer her fear of losing him in order to actually find him and return the favor.
As she let his answering machine play aloud on the landline—just one comically threatening message from his ex-wife about some divorce paperwork—she checked his bedroom, felt underneath the mattress, filtered through his closet, rattled around in the cabinets above the sink. She observed the neat, clearly not-slept-in sheets on his bed.
His office? She knew him well enough to sift through the files locked away in his desk, he was never careless, so whatever he had last been working on would be locked away there. She inputted the combination and there were new documents spilling out, certain words circled in pen.
They were confidential files on Detective Mark Hoffman, a few xeroxed copies of crime scene reports of older Jigsaw murders back from 2001, and a few different local newspaper clippings about the murder of Angelina Acomb. They had previously discussed the possibility of Detective Hoffman having been paid-off or blackmailed by Kramer to look the other way, given his lethargy around such a personal serial murder case.
She had sensed something off about him, besides his uncomfortable body language and shifting, dead-fish-at-the-market glass eyes. Right from the very moment of their introduction, as Peter described the eccentricities of the latest death trap: the hooked locks that had no ability to unlatch from Detective Kerry’s ribcage, or the impossibility of either of their perps lifting the weight of her unconscious body. Detective Hoffman had seemed completely hollow, a victim of the kind of oppressive loneliness that often followed cops home from work just like the violence did.
A photograph of a younger Mark Hoffman stared back at her from one of the printed, archived newspaper articles, stone-faced and mournful amongst the crowd of a funeral in an overcast procession. The article’s title read, “LOCAL MEDICAL STUDENT MURDERED IN COLD BLOOD.” There it was. Upon further inspection, he was credited as her foster brother, tucked in within a small blurb about his job as a detective amongst the wall of text. The journalist had sensationalized the piece, hinting to the reader to imagine the detective as a tragic hero, as the man who couldn't save the one thing he cared for most. Angelina Acomb had been Hoffman’s sister . Jigsaw had just so happened to have killed his sister’s murderer. And it was kept under wraps until now.
Peter must have followed their suspicions to their source. Perez cursed her own impulsive plea, the one word she managed to hiss through bloodied phlegm as they rolled her away in a gurney. Hoffman. Then, she cursed her impulsive partner.
Quickly, she grabbed some of the files, including Hoffman’s underlined address, locked the cabinet once more, exited out the front door, and sprinted back down to her car. She ignited her engine to the sound of approaching, distant sirens, and sped off down the dark road.
Dialing and pressing her phone to her ear, she floored it to get onto the highway.
“Agent Perez?”
“I’m en route to Detective Hoffman’s residence, South Washington Boulevard. I think Peter may be there, I’ll stay in contact.”
“What’s pointing to that? Agent, you’re on leave.”
“I know. I know. But what Peter was researching before we lost track of him—one of the first Jigsaw murders–Seth Baxter—Angelina Acomb’s killer. You won’t believe this.”
“What?”
“She was Detective Hoffman’s foster sister.”
“And we didn’t have this information before?”
“No. Seems like him and his buddies wanted to brush it under the rug. There was no connection between them in the case’s records. And his story, about broken arm straps?”
“That may be a lead, but we just acquired Strahm’s phone signal, we’re tracking it to a location across town; it looks like an unoccupied warehouse. He’s likely there, and I don’t know what we’re about to see. I’m sorry.”
She tightened her grip on the steering wheel. “Alright, please keep me updated.”
“You do the same. Stay home. You can question Hoffman when you’re back in form. We’re doing what we can to find Strahm. I don’t know what to make of this yet.”
“Alright.”
“Alright. I’ll be in touch.”
She briefly considered calling Erickson back and asking to follow the lead to the new location, to that warehouse, but something inside told her to keep driving to this address. The documents and the disarray and her heart told her that Peter had run headfirst, alone into the den of a serial killer that had avoided detection for the last half of a decade.
Lindsey was raised Catholic, but she hadn’t considered herself truly religious for any stretch of her life. Her uniquely lonely, imaginative adolescence provided her not with any extant belief in God, but in faith of her own intuition, a kind of spirituality that Peter would roll his eyes and snicker at if she ever tried to explain it.
Church was a way for people to find a routine, a social net, a facsimile of order; that way you didn’t have to fumble around in the terrible dark absence left when you realized nothing as singular as simple truth existed in this life. The old ladies would give her and her siblings little wrapped strawberry candies after the service, and that simple sweetness and repetition and tradition had stayed with her longer than any lofty sermon. When someone was alone, really alone, they needed the sermon.
John Kramer had given damaged people a sense of singular truth.
As she exited the alleyway towards this industrial, rough part of the city, she kept imagining seeing his car parked there. She imagined seeing him slumped miserably outside of it, leaning against the hood like a bum and waving her down with a cigarette in between his fingers. He would be beyond pissed at her for letting him believe her to be dead, yell for approximately five minutes straight, and then they would hug awkwardly for a few seconds at her insistence. Peter would say something caustic and biting, refusing to admit he was choked up. “Nobody tells me anything around here.”
When she actually did see Peter’s empty car parked across the street, it was hard to believe she wasn’t hallucinating. Closer, closer, she saw what she remembered to be Hoffman’s Charger parked there too. The rest of the street had only construction vehicles parked by the thin sidewalks like a ghost town.
Lindsey hopped out of her car, fumbling for her phone and flipping it open. She hesitated hitting the call button. Right. She’d call Erickson as soon as she got a sense of Hoffman or Peter at the door. It was better to ask for forgiveness than permission at this point.
She sprinted the rest of the way up the short driveway, the surrounding buildings gray and dead silent all around her. This part of town felt unsafe and abandoned. To say that it was an odd choice to reside here would be an understatement. The only sound was a few dogs barking miles away. Few, if any at all, other residences or neighboring buildings seemed populated.
She pounded on the door a few times, heart speeding out of her chest.
“Detective Hoffman? Detective Hoffman, are you home?” She called out, slamming her fist against the door even harder.
There was no response.
“FBI, open the door!” she tried again. There was only silence. “Open the door!”
The silence continued to stretch on. She could turn back around, report Peter’s car, and wait for backup to arrive. There was no goddamn time for that.
She typed a quick text to Erickson, <Peter’s car here. Going inside. Send backup if MIA 13:00>
Steeling herself, she began to throw her body against the door, attempting to break it down, remembering with mounting fear that this was always Peter’s job with his ridiculous linebacker shoulders. Again and again and again she banged against the heavy door, kicking now beneath the locks. It wasn’t going down, likely sealed up a hundred different ways, and so she made the next best questionable decision and method of gross property damage. Lindsey kicked in the closest window by the other side of the building.
She threw her jacket over the broken glass and hoisted herself up, shimmying in through the small space, still managing to cut her knee through her slacks on one of the larger shards. This landed her in the kitchen, and it was dark and completely still inside. It seemed like no one was home. A clock was ticking somewhere in the dark house.
Hand on the holster of her gun, she rounded the corner into the hallway, taking note of the plain decoration and neat quaintness of the rooms. The place looked like a TV set of a home more than a real one, filled with catalog furniture and a lack of many personal effects. There was a drafting table and sketches strewn about, designs drawn in charcoal.
Rounding the corner again, it seemed truly uninhabited.
That’s when she heard it, a deafening buzz of machinery turning on from downstairs. It sounded like a factory belt starting up, and it even rattled the furniture around her a little bit. The fine china with little pink roses on them that no adult man in law enforcement would ever own rattled in its glass case on the shelf. The noise from below reminded her of the deep groaning a boat made as it set sail.
This was what she imagined a small earthquake to feel like, which was not a good sign for what she assumed could be a Jigsaw trap. So, she was rushing to find the source of the strange sound, looking for a way downstairs from where it presumably emanated from. There was nothing in the bedroom, nothing in the living room, and then—the laundry room.
This was one of the few places in the house that looked truly lived in, piles of dirty dark clothes waiting to be washed, smelling sharp and greasy and metallic. There were mechanical engineering tools on the shelves, wrenches and rags and multimeters.
Behind the washer and dryer, there was a closet inside the already small laundry room, and inside that, a trap door left hanging wide open that looked like once it shut would blend into the floorboards. The trap-door led to a set of steep stairs leading further down. The sound just grew louder as she ventured deeper inside, nearly tripping over her feet and descending in haste.
The low noise kept increasing in volume, and she found the courage to call out, “FBI, hands where I can see them!” to seemingly no one and nothing in the dark. The basement was much larger than she anticipated, a long, stretching corridor with little hanging lights on the ceiling like a spelunking cave. There was a large metal door to her right, and it was nearly shaking with the force of the sound coming from within. When she tried to open it, it didn’t budge, her sweaty palms slipping against the handle. She called out again, to no response but that of the terrible noise.
Inside there were gunshots, two of them, and she banged on the door in a panic. Over the oppressive sound of the machinery it was too quiet for anyone to have heard her.
Perez heard a man screaming from inside, frantic and angry, but she couldn’t be sure who it belonged to. She remembered reading about some of the blueprints for traps found at the Gideon Meat Packing Plant, and potential future methods of murder Jigsaw had sketched out. When she had been bedridden in the hospital, instead of picking up a Cosmo, she had convinced her bureau analyst friend to slip her the documents to read while she recovered.
There were a few different electronically operated traps that would lose power if she could shut off the breaker. She remembered a few especially gruesome ones: a kind of moving rack that would stab into the victim’s eyes, a dual operated buzzsaw carving down someone’s abdominal cavity, and some archaic kind of iron bull. She couldn’t imagine whatever was making all that noise was operated without assistance from large amounts of power.
Running further down the corridor, feeling like a rat in the maze of the rusty industrial hallways she had never been so certain in her life Hoffman was their renegade accomplice. The power breaker had to be down here, she was certain of it, and she was searching these empty rooms with growing horror. There was practically another house down here.
Deeper in, the danker and more potent the smell of death became. And in a larger room she ran by, she saw it, tiled and white, too dark to see much else but a few corpses strewn about on the floor. A bathroom. The smell emanated most strongly from here; it was a bathroom full of corpses left to rot.
Backtracking, hyperventilating now, she kept running her hands along the walls, searching amongst the pipes and old metal pieces of machinery for the fuse box.
In one of the smaller corridors that she had already passed, now with her hands on the wall, she found the cold metallic box of the circuit breaker as well as another mechanical panel seemingly connected by thick wires to the other room. As fast as she could, using her phone as a light, she opened the boxes up and switched what she could off.
Eventually, the deep groaning of hydraulic machinery ceased. The lights had died.
Lindsey swallowed down against growing horror in her chest, and readied her gun, flipping off the safety.
She heard it then, a throaty groan of pain from inside the locked room. It was dark without overhead lights, and she felt her way back up towards the entrance, following cleaner air and the light emanating from the exit to the laundry closet.
Trying the door again, she now could kick it open.
And there he was. He was standing maybe four feet away, close enough for her to see the frayed, wet, and bloodied threads of his suit jacket peppered with shards of glass.
“Freeze! Hands where I can see them!” Lindsey ordered, taking a step back in shock, her gun still pointed straight ahead. Adrenaline rushed hard through her whole body.
Detective Hoffman was hunched over, stepping out of a glass compartment inside the floor, like a demon emerging from Hell, a monster waking from its coffin. The emergency system of the LEDs from above on the ceiling bathed him in Hellish red light.
His hands slowly raised up in surrender. He said nothing.
“Stay where you are. Don’t move.”
The hulking man had the audacity to look irritated at her appearance in his home, his broken nose going crooked with the force of his snarl. His eyes raked over her bandaged face with growing annoyance. It was like he was realizing the fly he hadn’t quite swatted with a rolled up newspaper had come back to buzz around in his face again.
“Lindsey .” And then to her right there was Peter, calling out to her in awe and pain, crouched down and shivering by the corner of the room. He was alive . One of his arms was a bloody, fleshy, broken mess, ulna completely sticking out of his mangled wrist, hand dangling off snapped bone like tender meat. It was just hanging there, looking ready to fall off if he moved too fast, and it was hemorrhaging badly, blood pooling around him on the floor.
He was shaking from the pain or the shock, face sickly white. She had never seen him look so small.
And in that split second she took her eyes off of Hoffman, the man ran at her in a dead weight tackle.
In that split second, she managed to fire her gun, blowing a hole clean through the top of Hoffman’s right shoulder, but he barreled straight through it, and through her, and took her down to the floor just outside the doorway, knocking the wind completely out of her with a smack of her head against concrete. He brutally unclamped the gun from her hands by crushing her fingers, and pistol whipped her hard enough across the face that her vision went dark.
When he spoke right in her ear it burned inside like smoke in seizing lungs. “Stupid fucking bitch. You should’ve stayed dead.” She tried to move or see or speak, but all that came out was a series of helpless, stuttering wheezes.
Lindsey could taste blood, and Peter was shouting threats to Hoffman amongst the swimming confusion in her head. She hacked and coughed and sputtered each time she tried to suck in a breath, raising herself up as far as she could upwards. If she had a concussion, if she had a cracked skull–
Now half-vertical on her knees, she could see Hoffman pointing her gun at Peter with madness on his face. They had lost their advantage. She had lost them their advantage.
“Who else knows?!” Hoffman spat, barrel chest heaving like a bull, gesturing between them with the firearm.
She wanted to cry in frustration. Hoffman could shoot them without much fanfare, and book it by the time Erickson even acknowledged her absence. She couldn’t save Peter and they were going to die here. She had lost everything. The entire right side of her face throbbed.
Steeling herself to face death, she needed to see Peter; she needed to apologize for everything. As she looked over, he was already looking right back at her, and his gaze wasn’t one of disappointment or fear or anger. He was calm. He looked at her with care, as winning as man could be with a loaded gun pointed right at his head. He was seeing her alive again, and that was enough for him to face death.
“Answer me, motherfucker!” Hoffman roared at Strahm.
She found her breath then, finding too, an endless strength in their partnership and camaraderie and love. They had to say a lot with just their looks, communicating nonverbally was an important part of their methodology as investigators, and this steady look told her “It’s going to be alright.” If they died, they died together, catching this monster. Hoffman wouldn’t get the payment of her terror.
“Everyone,” she managed to wheeze out. She gulped in more air. Saying it felt like victory, even as mouthing each word ached deeply in her jaw and skull. “Everyone knows. It’s over.”
Hoffman locked eyes with her, stricken by disbelief.
The veins in his purple-red head bulged. “You fucking liar,” he was saying, out of breath. His hand shook with the force he was grasping at the gun with. “Both of you, fucking liars.”
Peter was leaning precariously to the left, angled to where his ruined arm hung completely limp. He had to be close to losing consciousness, but he was never one to take anything lying down. The moment his eyes were back on Hoffman, his face contorted with ugly loathing. “Everyone is gonna see your ugly fuckin’ face in the paper again. Not a hometown hero anymore, huh? And after that they’re gonna sit you down in the chair and fry you, you sick son of a bitch!”
Hoffman seemed to decide something then, jaw clenched.
“Beg for her life. Make it good,” he requested lowly. He wanted Strahm to understand something.
Perez couldn’t believe what was happening, trying to collect her racing thoughts enough to prepare to die. If she could only make it back up the stairs–but she would be shot in the back.
“Beg.” Hoffman always had a vacancy to his eyes, a cavernous nothing when she would speak to him back at the precinct. Now, there was a kind of jolly sparkle; he was perversely satisfied. This kind of brutality was the only thing that warmed his walking corpse. His games were parables like Kramer's were. This parable would teach the victim that even the rawest begging and wishing and pleading wouldn't save the ones you love.
“Please, don’t hurt her.”
They stared each other down for a second or two; Peter was down on his knees like a man attempting to pray, and then Hoffman was on her again. He reached into his pocket, pulling out a small, scalloped utility knife.
“No! Please, please please, for the love of God—don’t fuckin’ touch her!”
Perez lurched desperately away, scrambling off the floor, but Hoffman had caught her by the hair, slamming her face into the wall twice, and then drove the blade directly into her stomach. Again and again and again he cut her open in quick succession.
“Stop. Stop! I’ll do whatever you want. Fuck! You fucking—”
It felt more like a bad dream than reality. The world around her was moving in slow motion, magma pooling thickly in her veins, and then pouring out of her gut. He had stabbed her lower abdomen three times. She thought that maybe he perforated her digestive tract. Training footage of fatal stab wounds played in her mind. She felt distinctly like a popped balloon falling to the ground, leaking and sinking and deflating. Lindsey slumped over in horrible, urgent pain, clutching at the incisions just below her belly button, body going both fiery hot and ice cold in shock.
Peter was raging and screaming, and the high-pitched panic of his voice set her right back into action, like a shot of pure adrenaline. It couldn’t have been more than a few seconds before she was getting up again, using the wall to lean pitifully against and raise herself up. Then, she felt it. The knife was still stuck there right where she could grab it, glittering from where it remained embedded in her belly like cutlery stuck in a rare steak. It was slippery and hot and fateful in her hands.
Hoffman had been forced to turn away and knock Peter back with the gun before he had time to finish her off. There was an opening.
She wasn't dead yet.
Peter screamed again in agony, and she found the strength to stand up. She slid the knife out of her belly with a gasp, more blood spewing out like a faucet. There was red everywhere. The red emergency LEDs made it difficult to differentiate where her guts began and the room ended.
Hoffman’s wide back was turned away from her, and he was threatening, gesticulating with the gun above Peter’s writhing body on the floor. He looked like the king of terrors and death: the gloating devil and his hydras defeating Archangel Michael. But the devil had made his final mistake, choosing to goad and stamp over and over and over upon Peter’s ruined arm under his foot, not bothering to look behind him—ruled by dumb wrath.
She struck quickly. On the side of his injured shoulder, his right side where the bullet had hit him, she drove the knife right underneath Hoffman’s exposed jaw, right into the vulnerable carotid artery in his neck, plunging the knife as deep as it would go. She yanked.
Immediately, he gasped like a dying, fluttering fish on a line, hands flying to the tearing stab wound in his throat, and then to try and grab her, or shake her off of him, body undulating with panic. But she was already tearing the knife further down, across the whole span of thick neck and creating a fatal gouging slit, her body latching flat onto his back where he couldn’t bend to get a hold on her.
Peter raised up to grab the gun with his good arm before he could aim, tearing it out of Hoffman’s hands. The gun fired into the side of the wall amidst the struggle, missing. Peter kicked, and then Hoffman finally crumpled the rest of the way onto the floor, gargling and grabbing around the open, red expanse of his throat. No amount of pressure would staunch it.
Lindsey’s legs were going numb now, as she watched him fight so intensely his body’s urge to die, animalistic and wide-eyed and terrible. Hoffman hissed like a snake, writhing and sliding across the floor like one, too. His neck was gushing wide open, and she could see a perverted imitation of the iconography Angelina, who had died much the same, blessing his passing like a martyred saint. Hoffman looked more scared than angry now, bloody hands wrung around his own throat.
“Son of a bitch,” Peter was saying, sounding miles away.
Her legs were giving out. Her partner caught her as best as he could with one arm, putting pressure on her belly, and holding them together as they both slid down and bled out onto the floor. She felt vacuum sealed to his chest, tight and sticky with blood, and she couldn’t crane her head to make sure Hoffman was dying anymore. She kept trying, panicked that he would just get back up, but eventually grew too tired to struggle.
They had already done this song and dance once before. She was too out of it to hear whatever else Peter was telling her, in a terrifyingly slow, calm tone, but when he pulled her phone out of her pants pocket she felt like she could finally close her eyes and rest. He was going to be okay. He was calling for help.
The deep red of the world was going dark around her, and the pain started to fade away until she felt truly incorporeal.
There were crickets chirping outside like the soft memory of a summer night.
Her mother sat at the head of a large dining table, the old oak one from her childhood home back in Milwaukee that she used crayons to draw underneath while other kids played outside with their friends, and her mother looked young and happy, the way Lindsey had only seen her in old pictures. With her warm, strong hands she stroked Lindsey's own clasped ones, and they all said grace. Her father was there, too, watching her with love and patience behind his thick glasses. She hadn’t seen him since she was ten years old and he died of a heart attack. Her brothers and sister were there, not even bothering to argue. There was a full moon outside.
She felt safe.
Peter was sitting right next to her at the table too, looking rude and ridiculous and out of place as he hesitantly said grace with them: the comical picture of the atheist thanking God. And she laughed hard at his clumsy courtesy, interrupting the gathering’s prayer with embarrassing, long, hiccupping laughter that stole the breath from her lungs. He laughed right back back at her, smiling carefree and unburdened, and they ate dinner.