The Value of a Life

Susan walked up the hall to her husband’s home office. She knocked at the door and waited patiently for his call of ‘come in’ before actually going in. She had been married to Detective Mark Hoffman for nearly ten years and she had learned in those ten years that coming into his office without permission was sometimes not a good idea. He was a cop, a forensic detective to be exact, and his work was never glamorous, hardly ever bearable for her.
“Come on in,” he called. She had heard him moving around some papers before calling her in. When she opened the door, he was closing his brief case and laying it to rest for the night.
“It’s late, are you coming to bed soon?” she asked.
“Yeah, I’ll be right in,” he said with a tired smile. She smiled back, then turned and left the room.

Mark watched his wife go, his adrenaline easing back down. It always frightened him how close of quarters she lived in to his secret. He loved her, and therefore, she could never know about what he and John really did. She thought they were solving the case, when really, they were forwarding it.
When he met John Kramer three years ago, it had been by chance. Sure, he had opened the window and caused the meeting, but had he not stepped into that exact elevator at that exact time, he would have missed him. Not that John wouldn’t have found him later through other means. And he was looking for him for a specific reason anyway. Because his last murder at the time had not been the work of Jigsaw, though it had looked much like it. It had been committed by Mark himself.
A year before that, right before he had been put on the Jigsaw case, he and Susan had lost their little girl to a pedophiliac murderer who had raped their daughter, then cut her up into little pieces. What the killer hadn’t known was how long it had take he and Susan to finally conceive and carry the child to term, how many times he and his wife had held little Isabella and thanked God for finally giving them their child. To have her ripped so readily from their hands and her life so gruesomely ended, sickened Mark and depressed Susan to a place he had never seen her fall into.
She laid in bed, lethargic and seemingly life-less inside. He was hurting in a more “walking pneumonia” way, carrying through his life, all the while knowing things weren’t okay. Susan barely spoke to him at all for almost six months. For them, it was not normal. He and Susan had met in college and had become best friends and passionate lovers very quickly. And even with marriage, their love and passion for each other never faltered. He thought for a while that this was going to split them apart. Upon the realization, he became very desperate.
The cops caught the perpetrator a few months after Isabella went missing. But through a crafty defense attorney and a supposed addiction to pornography, along with a childhood of abuse and neglect, he was let go with strict probation and rehabilitation. It stunned Susan, plunging her even deeper into her depression, and sickened Mark, more than he was willing to deal with. He began following the guy for a while, seeing how many people might actually miss him, how faithful he was being to the ruling of the court. But the more he followed, the more he watched his wife dying on the inside, the more his rage churned and boiled until one night, he set up the lethal trap and sealed the fate of the man who killed his daughter. Little did he know he was sealing his own fate in the process.
Having been on the Jigsaw cases for sometime now, he saw the answer to his dilemma. He had been studying the murder traps set up by the infamous Jigsaw killer, and began imagining how he would set it up, how he would want the man to suffer. He kept coming home to Susan in bed, asleep, barely moving. She had lost nearly 25 lbs. from inactivity and lack of any regular eating pattern. It was frightening him. One night, he came home to find her half awake.
“Susan? Are you awake?” he asked, sitting on the bed next to her, touching her side. He could feel her ribs, the lack of muscle and fat. She had never been a heavy woman, by any means, but she had been healthy, slim, but soft and muscled. She groaned. “Sweetheart, I think maybe you should try to eat something,” he said.
“’M not hungry,” she groaned.
“Please, Susan, please, you’re scaring me,” he pleaded. She didn’t say another word. Instead, she fell back asleep. Tears welled in his eyes, and he frowned and scraped them away with the back of his fists. He wasn’t the type of man who didn’t care, who thought she should just get over it, nor was he the type to go looking for someone else while she wasted away. It was then that he decided it was time to change things, take them into his own hands.
It took about two weeks to set up the trap. Capturing the man had been easy, and watching him die had enticed a rush, and sense of accomplishment. When the swinging, axe-style pendulum slashed into his flesh, again and again, his screams provided Mark with the satisfaction of knowing that the man who had so willingly taken his daughters life, and indirectly was in the process of taking his wife’s, was dying, and that his blood was on his hands. The papers, as well as the cops and the Bureau, believed undeniably that it had been the work of Jigsaw and Mark had walked away without so much as a single suspicion directed at him.
He had come home to find his wife, freshly showered, sitting at the kitchen table. He looked around and saw that the kitchen was spotless, as was most of the house.
“Susan?” he called, laying his coat on the back of the chair. He came in and saw that she was reading the newspaper.
“Did you know about this?” she asked, pointing to the headline. It read ‘Jigsaw Strikes Again, Punishes a Local Sex Offender’. His blood ran cold with adrenaline.
“Yes-“
“How could you not tell me?!” she said.
“I-I didn’t want to upset you, I thought it would just-“
“Upset me? Mark, I, I’m relieved,” she said, barely above a whisper. She bit her lip, not lifting her eyes from the paper in front of her. When she finally did look at him again, tears were rimming her brown eyes. “Is that bad?” she whispered. And for the first time in nearly seven months, he saw his wife, the woman with whom he fell in love. He knelt down in front of her and grabbed her hands.
“No,” he said, looking up at her, on the verge of tears himself. “No, Susan, it’s not bad.” Her face wrinkled and she sobbed. He wrapped his arms around her tight. She felt fragile in his arms, so thin and yet, the reverberating sobs shook her, and he felt her finally breaking free of her internal coma. She was waking up, he was certain of that. It made him feel even better about having done the deed himself, though he knew she could never know that. She believed in the hero he was, the cop, the good guy.
“Oh Mark, Mark, I’m sorry,” she sobbed.
“Shhh,” he cooed, taking her face between his hands and holding it there. “I love you, Susan,” he said. She smiled through her tears and he thought he would cry out for joy at the sight.
“I love you too,” she said. He swept her up and carried her upstairs.
That night, for the first time since the death of their daughter, they made love.