"Angie..."

Hoffman curled his hand around the newspaper until his knuckles whitened and the paper creased. The ink left dark smears across the pads of his fingers but he scarcely noticed, and continued to tighten his grip until the hateful, painful facts printed on the page were almost obliterated and the bones in his hand were starting to ache. This pain nagged at him until he was forced to relax his grasp, and then he hurled the paper across the desk and snatched up the bottle that sat beside it instead, sucking down the last of the bourbon. The liquid scorched the back of his tongue and, instead of placating his hatred, simply goaded it instead. The detective growled and tossed the empty bottle aside, hearing it smash in the far corner of his office, not caring in the slightest that the floor was now sprayed with vicious shards of glass.

His eyes narrowed and stung as they strayed back to the newspaper. The headline was hidden, but he could still see the photograph on the paper, and it stared back at him. Seth Baxter. The loathsome fucking animal that had taken his little sister away from him, pinning her to the bed and taking a switchblade to her soft throat as she struggled to escape. Hoffman closed his hand once more, remembering how Angelina's skin had felt as he'd clutched at her limp, dead fingers, kissing them, feeling the last of her warmth drain away under the desperate press of his lips.

Angie's photograph stood on the shelf behind his desk, but he could feel her hazel eyes boring through the back of his neck, and he didn't dare turn to face her accusing gaze. Baxter had been walked free from prison on a technicality after just five years, and there was nothing that Hoffman could do about any of this. He'd failed to protect her, and now he'd failed to ensure justice was served for the result of an already unforgivable lapse in responsibility.

There was a knock on the office door. Hoffman jerked in his chair, straightening his back and rubbing at his eyes with the back of his hand; he was sure that between his overbearing grief and the effects of the alcohol, they must be as red as a weasel's by now. He cleared his throat, stowed the newspaper out of sight beneath a stack of folders and raised his head, his lips thinning.

"Come in," he barked, more sharply than he'd intended.

The door inched open, revealing Fisk outlined in the harsh light from the corridor strips. He ran his eyes over his superior before shooting a glance at the spray of broken glass in the corner of the room, but either time was pressing or he elected to remain in tactful silence, because he simply pursed his mouth a little and then coughed nervously.

"Detective Matthews radioed in," he said, soberly. "Uniformed officers attended a possible homicide downtown. He's at the scene now."

"Jigsaw?" asked Hoffman, shoving his chair back and climbing to his feet. He stopped halfway across the office and watched Fisk; the man was suddenly looking extremely skittish in the face of this query.

"He didn't say anything about that," said Fisk, after a hesitant second or two. "Just that he wants you down there right away." He stepped closer now, handing over a slip of paper with an address scrawled upon it.

"Okay, whatever," said Hoffman, wearily, dismissing the issue with a flick of his hand and noting the address. "Tell him I'll be there in ten or fifteen."

When Fisk had left, closing the office door with an air of profound relief about him, Hoffman turned to retrieve his sidearm, hanging in its holster, and then straightened his cuffs before putting on his jacket. Only once he'd smoothed the line of his suit to his satisfaction, brushing at the smallest of creases, did he retrieve the crumpled newspaper from his hiding place under the paperwork on his desk. His chest tightened once more as his eyes tracked over the outlines and shadows of the face of the monster it depicted, and he felt his heartbeat begin to thump in his throat as his fury simmered just under his skin.

"You're not getting away, fucker," he breathed, and then turned aside and dumped the paper into the trash before leaving the room.

The darkness in the cellar was perfect, almost tangible, and for a moment after he stepped through the door, Hoffman heard nothing but a small collection of sounds.

At first, his footsteps on the soft clay floor masked the other noises, but as the detective paused in the doorway to locate his flashlight, they began to bleed through the resultant silence. He heard something dripping - not water, but something far more glutinous, pattering and trickling into the dust. There was an irregular hiss and thump that he eventually attributed to the ancient heating pipes on the far wall. Finally, he heard something that crept in under his skin and teased his nerves: the skeletal clatter and jingle of chains. Closing sweat-slick fingers on the butt of his flashlight at last and thumbing the switch, he raised it and played the beam around the room.

At once, he caught sight of something in the light's soft circle that had him stepping back in a blend of surprise and disgust. A severed hand depended from a rusted iron hook, swinging two and fro at the end of a chain, not two feet from his face. The hook had pierced the limb through the loose flesh between finger and thumb, puncturing the skin so cleanly that nothing but the smallest runner of blood had escaped the wound. With each swing the fingers swayed and drooped a little, as if in one last, vaguely satirical imitation of life.

"Who turned the fucking lights out?" said a hoarse voice from behind his shoulder. Eric Matthews stumbled down the creaking wooden steps and slapped at the switches on the wall. For a few seconds the fluorescents failed to respond, and then, grudgingly, they snapped into life one after the other, washing the scene with bright but anaemic blue light.

"Oh Christ," muttered Hoffman, his lip curling as he moved back further still, his head turning stiffly as he tried to take in the scene before him.

There were so many more chains – and so many more hooks, each with its own parcel of fresh meat – that he soon lost count. Most were not even recognisable parts, but mere ragged snags and tatters of skin and muscle, painted with blood. Here and there, though, he could see something telling: a lip, a finger, a foot. He glanced from one dripping horror to the next with his eyes dulling and his lungs cramped, so absorbed in this that at first, he didn't hear his partner call for the crime scene investigators. Only when Matthews stashed the radio once more and hung his head, issuing a sharp, snorting breath through his nose, did Hoffman tear his rooted gaze from the gruesome tableau that filled the cellar.

"What?" he said, vaguely, half-turning, aware that his partner had spoken.

"I said, do you think it's Jigsaw?" asked Matthews, and his voice was still both rough and flat. He moved out of Hoffman's shadow now and dodged between two of the swaying chains, careful to avoid the blood trickling from them. He pulled a pair of gloves from his hip pocket and snapped them on before reaching out to examine a dangling scrap of flesh, chosen seemingly at random.

"Who else would it be?" asked Hoffman, gruffly. There was a pinpoint headache forming behind his left eye, and it nagged at him and shortened his already strained temper.

"Dunno," said Matthews, with a tiny shrug. "But this isn't exactly Jigsaw's M.O., is it? No audio tape, no videotape, and no mechanism at all." He caught Hoffman's eye and then raised his face to the ceiling. "If the victim was ripped apart by these chains, I'd like to know how it was done, 'cause there's nothing up there except more hooks."

Hoffman glanced up, and sure enough, the chains were suspended from the ceiling by nothing more than smaller hooks, mostly caught over the beams, but some had been driven into the rough wood itself where the perpetrator hadn't found better purchase. He stepped forward, still tracking his eyes across the ceiling, and moved to join his partner in the midst of that sea of whispering chains.

"What do we know about the deceased?" he asked, absently, still studying the scene through a puzzled frown. When he received no immediate response, he craned his neck and found Matthews staring at a chain just a few inches from his face. It turned gently, and Hoffman saw with renewed revulsion that there was a single blue eyeball neatly skewered upon the dependent hook. Conquering his reaction with some difficulty, he snapped his fingers at his partner.

"Eric," he growled, "get a fucking grip, it's just another crime scene. What do we know?"

Matthews finally took a step back and refocused on Hoffman, and then cleared his throat slightly. "Not much," he said, eventually. "Uniform didn't report finding any ID in the vicinity and there's little we can tell from the, uh," he hesitated, indicating the bloodied fragments with a wave of his hand, "from the body. Male, Caucasian, maybe mid thirties, but don't quote me on anything but gender, and that's only because we found –"

"Yeah, I get the picture," said Hoffman, curtly, cutting across the other detective and turning away again. Now he'd managed to force his attention away from the human detritus, he saw that the floor was littered with the stubs of burnt-out candles, and – he dropped his gaze now, his frown deepening – what looked like symbols scrawled in dried blood just inside the borders of a large square scratched into the packed earth of the cellar floor. He elected to ignore this oddity for the moment, though, and jerked his head back up.

"Where's the guy's clothes?" he asked. Matthews's expression furrowed for a second before understanding dawned, and he turned for a second and nodded at the far corner of the room. "There's some clothing folded up over there," he explained, "but it might not be his."

Hoffman pressed his fingers to his temple for a second; the headache was back, gnawing at the lining of his skull like a rat trapped in a box. "Let's not make this any more complicated than we have to, okay?" he said, bluntly. "Sounds like CSI's arrived, anyway," he added, cocking an ear at the stairs, "so if I were you I'd go tell them they're gonna need plenty of baggies for this one."

When Matthews had creaked his way back up the distressed steps to the light above, Hoffman spun on his heel and inspected the scrawls on the floor once more. There was no doubt that they had been drawn by hand, and quite deliberately so: the lines were fine to the point that they might as well have been written with a quill pen. They formed the inner border to a crude line drawn in the floor, that line marking out a square some five feet wide. Curiously, and in spite of the fact that there was a welter of tarry, congealing blood from the victim drenching the floor all the way to the walls, the interior of the square was innocent of stains.

Hoffman shifted his weight and made to cross the square, wanting to examine the far side of the scrawl, when his foot fetched up against something on the cold floor that moved slightly. He stepped back half a pace and crouched down, reaching out and closing his gloved fingers on a small box. He stood up again and brought his hand into the glare of the fluorescent tubes, turning the object to and fro as spears of light glanced and fled from the delicately etched brass panels laid into its sides.

The puzzle box was no more than three inches on a side, but as Hoffman weighed it thoughtfully, it felt heavier than it ought to, as if it contained something far more than the sum of whatever mechanism lay beneath its faces. He angled his wrist again, and this time the reflected light flashed across his face, running through his eyes like a scalpel, and he –

(...angie...god no...she was my family my only family my...NO!...)

The taste of blood brought him back to his senses, but it took him a few seconds to understand that he'd bitten into his tongue to stifle a shriek, and it was only with this realisation that the pain filtered through as well, raising a low groan from the pit of his breathless chest. He blinked, clearing his vision, and looked more closely at the box. It nestled in his palm now, as quiet and as still as death, and though he turned it back and forth, he could not reproduce what had just taken place. It wasn't until he lowered his hand again that he felt the hairs on the back of his neck prickling painfully...and realised that the subtle rattle of the chains all around him had stilled at once.

This fresh silence was broken by the low mutter of voices and squeal of feet on the wooden steps; Matthews was returning with the crime scene officers. Hoffman's hand clenched involuntarily, closing on the box so tightly that he felt his nails tear through the latex of his glove, bringing the pads of his fingers into contact with the thing at last. Whatever comprised it, simple mahogany and bright brass panels, was colder than blue ice beneath his touch, and he gasped as this fierce sensation ran up his arm and into his heart like a rapier. He felt his muscles move of their own volition, and slipped the box into his pocket.

"What's the story down here?" called Matthews, descending the steps once more. His voice was now muffled by a paper mask, and it wasn't until then that Hoffman realised that there was in fact a deep, musky and very distressing odour about the cellar. The detective was leading a small deputation of CSI officers in white coveralls and goggles, and once they reached the bottom of the steps, they fanned out with practised ease. One unpacked a camera and began to photograph the scene; Hoffman turned his eyes away from the strident snap of the flashbulb and took his partner aside to the foot of the steps.

"This isn't a Jigsaw scene," he murmured, keeping his voice as low as he could. Matthews's eyes creased momentarily above the mask, which he then tugged aside the better to respond.

"I told you that from the start," he retorted. "I don't think the chief's going to agree, though, so until he says otherwise, that's how we're gonna have to treat it."

"This is my investigation," said Hoffman, his voice still soft but now laced with determination.

"Not if he takes you off it, it isn't. Now wise up and do this by the book." Matthews gave him a once-over glance. "What's gotten into you lately?"

Hoffman nursed his still-bleeding tongue in silence for a moment, debating his response. The two of them had not been partners at the time of Angelina's murder; Hoffman was fresh out of uniform at the time and still ranked some way below Matthews in spite of his greater age. Only the other detective's disciplinary demotion four years ago had brought them together as equals and, finally, partners. In truth, he had no idea if Matthews even knew the details of the case, since it had not occurred in their jurisdiction. If not, it would serve no purpose to tell him, and certainly not here, in the midst of more death. He leaned his shoulder against the wall, and this jarred him with the incriminating weight of the strange box, secreted in the pocket of his coat.

"Nothing," he said at last, meeting Matthews's eyes by force of will and setting his jaw.

"You sure about that?"

"I'm sure," snapped Hoffman, and then brushed past his partner without a further word or glance and climbed the steps, slitting his eyes against the dazzling sunlight.

He felt his hand stray to his pocket as he drew a breath of much-needed fresh air, and then ran his fingers over the lines and angles of the concealed object. Somehow, in spite of the warmth in which it had been nestled, snug against his side, the box was now even colder.