Tech Team

### Purpose

Pinpointing locations, decrypting audio tapes, analyzing tapes, tracing audio feed and recordings

### Members

Sachi
Unnamed Technician

### Relationships

FBI (subdivision)
Homicide Unit (subdivision)
SWAT (subdivision)

## History

### Eric Matthews' Test

Upon looking at the monitors, they saw what appeared to be another one of Jigsaw's games and recognized one of the eight victims as Eric's son, Danieler, they didn't know that the footage was pre-recorded and assumed that the events were unfolding live. After seeing the recording of the game, Eric immediately attempted to attack John and angrily yelled at him before being held back by Rigg. John then explained to Eric the rules of his test. Eric's colleagues had to leave the room while Eric merely had to sit down and talk to John for a period of two hours until a timer went off. If he could successfully do that, he'd eventually see his son again. Otherwise, his son and the other prisoners would be killed by a deadly nerve agent.

Eric then unsuccessfully tried to call his son, as he was hoping that Jigsaw was only bluffing. Kerry tried to calm Eric down. However, this attempt remained unsuccessful as Eric got more and more nervous, especially when the first victim, Gus Colyard, was killed by a booby trap only a few minutes after the game began. On Rigg's advice, Kerry called for a tech team to trace back the video broadcast.

### Deception

However, as time went by and Eric saw the footage of Xavier Chavez' deadly rampage in the house, he brutally beat John up to make him reveal Daniel's whereabouts. Kerry immediately tried to stop him, but she was held back by Rigg. When Eric threatened John with his gun, the latter offered to take him to the house, but demanded to go there with Eric alone. Eric agreed and left the building with John in a hidden elevator. As they left the building, Kerry sent the SWAT team after them, while she stayed with Joe and the tech team as they traced the video feed back to an address at 237 North Hyde Crescent shortly afterwards. However, when Rigg and his team arrived there, they realized that the game was already over and the video feed was merely a recording, so Kerry told the team to come back. As the timer went off, a safe in John's hideout suddenly opened and revealed Daniel Matthews, who had been locked up in the safe all along.

### Reopening the Seth Baxter Case

Soon afterwards, Dr. Adam Heffner, the police department's pathologist, called the agents and Mark Hoffman to the morgue. Upon the obduction of Eddie, Heffner had discovered that a knife with a tined blade had been used to cut the jigsaw piece from Eddie's skin, while the pieces of most previous victims had been cut off with a plain scalpel. Upon comparing this case with other previous cases, the agents had found out that the tined blade had only been used once before, to cut the jigsaw piece from the body of Seth Baxter, the murderer of Hoffman's sister, Angelina Acomb. As a different knife had been used, Perez and Erickson had ordered to further analyze the video tape found at Seth's crime scene, thinking that it might have been recorded by someone else as well.

Erickson was then interrupted by a phone call from the FBI's technical lab. Hoffman asked Perez if there were any news about the Seth Baxter tape, which she confirmed. Despite the fact that the tape was in a bad state, they were able to authenticate that the voice on the tape wasn't John Kramer's voice. Therefore, they had sent the tape to the technical lab to rectify it so they could hear the original voice. When she told Hoffman about it, she realized that his stopwatch was running and asked if he was timing something, to which he responded that he did before receiving the call from Erickson. Moments later, Erickson told them that the original voice on the Seth Baxter tape was soon going to be decrypted and told Hoffman and Perez to accompany them to the external lab.

The group reached the lab soon afterwards. When they came in, FBI technician Sachi was still working on the tape. As they had to wait some more time, Hoffman took a cup of coffee from the machine in the room. Noticing Hoffman's increasing nervousness, Perez tried to put him under pressure and began to discuss Strahm's motivation for helping Jigsaw and stated that she had never suspected him to be mentally unstable during the five years she had worked with him. Erickson, now also noticing Hoffman's nervous behavior, then talked about the possibility that Strahm had killed Seth Baxter to throw suspicion on Hoffman. However, there was still some detail that didn't fit the picture and therefore he finally revealed to Hoffman, that Strahm, judging by the analysis of his fingerprints, must have already been dead by the time he left his prints at the crime scene of Simone and Eddie's game. Seconds later, Sachi restored the tape, finally revealing the voice to be that of Mark Hoffman.