Текст книги "Postmortem"

Автор книги: Патрисия Корнуэлл

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YOUNG SURGEON SLAIN: BELIEVED TO BE STRANGLER'S FOURTH VICTIM A 30-year-old surgical resident was found brutally murdered inside her home in Berkley Downsshortly after midnight. Police say there is strong evidence that her death is related to the deaths of three other Richmond women who were strangled in their homes within the last two months.

The most recent victim has been identified as Lori Anne Petersen, a graduate of Harvard Medical School. She was last seen alive yesterday, shortly after midnight, when she left the VMC hospital emergency room, where she was currently completing a rotation in trauma surgery. It is believed she drove directly home from the hospital and was murdered sometime between twelve thirty and two this morning. The killer apparently got inside her house by cutting a screen to a bathroom window that was unlocked…

It went on. There was a photograph, a grainy black-and-white tableau of paramedics carrying her body down the front steps, and a smaller photograph of a figure in a khaki raincoat I recognized as me. The caption read: "Dr. Kay Scarpetta, Chief Medical Examiner, Arriving at Murder Scene."

Lucy was staring wide-eyed at me. Bertha had been wise to hide the paper, but Lucy was resourceful. I didn't know what to say. What does a ten-year-old think when she reads something like this, especially if it is accompanied by a grim photograph of her "Auntie Kay"? I'd never fully explained to Lucy the details of my profession. I'd restrained myself from preaching to her about the savage world in which we live. I didn't want her to be like me, robbed of innocence and idealism, baptized in the bloody waters of randomness and cruelty, the fabric of trust forever torn.

"It's like the Herald," she quite surprised me by saying. "All the time there's stuff in the Herald about people being killed. Last week they found a man in the canal and his head was cut off. He must have been a bad man for someone to cut his head off.

"He may have been, Lucy. But it doesn't justify someone's doing something like that to him. And not everyone who is hurt or murdered is bad."

"Mom says they are. She says good people don't get murdered. Only hookers and drug dealers and burglars do."

A thoughtful pause. "Sometimes police officers, too, because they try to catch the bad people."

Dorothy would say such a thing and, what was worse, she would believe it. I felt a flare of the old anger.

"But the lady who got strangled," Lucy wavered, her eyes so wide they seemed to swallow me. "She was a doctor, Auntie Kay. How could she be bad? You're a doctor, too. She was just like you, then."

I was suddenly aware of the time. It was getting late. I switched off the computer, took Lucy's hand, and we walked out of the office and into the kitchen. When I turned to her to suggest a snack before bed, I was dismayed to see she was biting her bottom lip, her eyes welling.

"Lucy! Why are you crying?"

She wrapped around me, sobbing. Clinging to me with fierce desperation, she cried, "I don't want you to die! I don't want you to die!"

"Lucy…"

I was stunned, bewildered. Her tantrums, her arrogant and angry outbursts were one thing. But this! I could feel her tears soaking through my blouse. I could feel the hot intensity of her miserable little body as she held on to me.

"It's all right, Lucy," was all I could think to say, and I pressed her close.

"I don't want you to die, Auntie Kay!"

"I'm not going to die, Lucy."

"Daddy did."

"Nothing is going to happen to me, Lucy."

She was not to be consoled. The story in the paper affected her in a deep and pernicious way. She read it with an adult intellect yet to be weaned from a child's fearful imagination. This in addition to her insecurities and losses.

Oh, Lord. I groped for the appropriate response and couldn't come up with a thing. My mother's accusations began throbbing in some deep part of my psyche. My inadequacies. I had no children. I would have made an awful mother. "You should have been a man," my mother had said during one of our less productive encounters in recent history. "All work and ambition. It's not natural for a woman. You'll dry out like a chinch bug, Kay."

And during my emptiest moments when I felt the worst about myself, damn if I wouldn't see one of those chinch bug shells that used to litter the lawn of my childhood home. Translucent, brittle, dried out. Dead.

It wasn't something I would ordinarily do, pour a ten-year-old a glass of wine.

I took her to her room and we drank in bed. She asked me questions impossible to answer.

"Why do people hurt other people?" and "Is it a game for him? I mean, does he do it for fun, sort of like MTV? They do things like that on MTV, but it's make-believe. Nobody gets hurt. Maybe he doesn't mean to hurt them, Auntie Kay."

"There are some people who are evil," I quietly replied. "Like dogs, Lucy. Some dogs bite people for no reason. There's something wrong with them. They're bad and will always be bad."

"Because people were mean to them first. That's what makes them bad."

"In some instances, yes," I told her. "But not always. Sometimes there isn't a reason. In a way, it doesn't matter. People make choices. Some people would rather be bad, would rather be cruel. It's just an ugly, unfortunate part of life."

"Like Hitler," she muttered, taking a swallow of wine.

I began stroking her hair.

She rambled on, her voice thick with sleep, "Like Jimmy Groome, too. He lives on our street and shoots birds with his BB gun, and he likes to steal bird eggs out of nests and smash them on the road and watch the baby birds struggle. I hate him. I hate Jimmy Groome. I threw a rock at him once and hit him when he was riding by on his bike. But he doesn't know it was me because I was hiding behind the bushes."

I sipped wine and continued stroking her hair.

"God won't let anything happen to you, will He?" she asked.

"Nothing is going to happen to me, Lucy. I promise."

"If you pray to God to take care of you, He does, doesn't He?"

"He takes care of us." Though I wasn't sure I believed it.

She frowned. I'm not sure she believed it either. "Don't you ever get scared?"

I smiled. "Everybody gets scared now and then. I'm perfectly safe. Nothing's going to happen to me."

The last thing she mumbled before drifting off was "I wish I could always be here, Auntie Kay. I want to be just like you."

Two hours later, I was upstairs and still wide-awake and staring at a page in a book without really seeing the words when the telephone rang.

My response was Pavlovian, a startled reflex. I snatched up the receiver, my heart thudding. I was expecting, fearing, Marino's voice, as if last night were starting all over again.

"Hello."

Nothing.

"Hello?"

In the background I could hear the faint, spooky music I associated with early-morning foreign movies or horror films or the scratchy strains of a Victrola before the dial tone cut it off.

"Coffee?"

"Please," I said.

This sufficed for a "Good morning."

Whenever I stopped by Neils Vander's lab, his first word of greeting was "Coffee?"

I always accepted. Caffeine and nicotine are two vices I've readily adopted.

I wouldn't think of buying a car that isn't as solid as a tank, and I won't start the engine without fastening my seatbelt. There are smoke alarms throughout my house, and an expensive burglar alarm system. I no longer enjoy flying and opt for Amtrak whenever possible.

But caffeine, cigarettes and cholesterol, the grim reapers of the common man – God forbid I should give them up. I go to a national meeting and sit at a banquet with three hundred other forensic pathologists, the world's foremost experts in disease and death. Seventy-five percent of us don't jog or do aerobics, don't walk when we can ride, don't stand when we can sit, and assiduously avoid stairs or hills unless they're on the decline. A third of us smoke, most of us drink, and all of us eat as if there is no tomorrow.

Stress, depression, perhaps a greater need for laughter and pleasure because of the misery we see – who can be sure of the reason? One of my more cynical friends, an assistant chief in Chicago, likes to say, "What the hell. You die. Everybody dies. So you die healthy. So what?"

Vander went to the drip coffee machine on the counter behind his desk and poured two cups. He had fixed my coffee countless times and could never remember I drink it black.

My ex-husband never remembered either. Six years I lived with Tony and he couldn't remember that I drink my coffee black or like my steaks medium-rare, not as red as Christmas, just a little pink. My dress size, forget it. I wear an eight, have a figure that will accommodate most anything, but I can't abide fluff, froth and frills. He always got me something in a six, usually lacy and gauzy and meant for bed. His mother's favorite color was spring green. She wore a size fourteen. She loved ruffles, hated pullovers, preferred zippers, was allergic to wool, didn't want to bother with anything that had to be dry-cleaned or ironed, had a visceral antagonism toward anything purple, deemed white or beige impractical, wouldn't wear horizontal stripes or paisley, wouldn't have been caught dead in Ultrasuede, believed her body wasn't compatible with pleats and was quite fond of pockets the more the better. When it came to his mother, Tony would somehow get it right.

Vander dumped the same heaping teaspoons of whitener and sugar into my cup as he dumped into his own.

Typically, he was disheveled, his wispy gray hair wild, his voluminous lab coat smeared with black fingerprint powder, a spray of ballpoint pens and felt-tip markers protruding from his ink-stained breast pocket. He was a tall man with long, bony extremities and a disproportionately round belly. His head was shaped remarkably like a light bulb, his eyes a washed-out blue and perpetually clouded by thought.

My first winter here he stopped by my office late one afternoon to announce it was snowing. A long red scarf was wrapped around his neck, and pulled over his ears was a leather flight helmet, possibly ordered from a Banana Republic catalogue and absolutely the most ridiculous winter hat I'd ever seen. I think he would have looked perfectly at home inside a Fokker fighter plane. "The Flying Dutchman," we appropriately called him around the office. He was always in a hurry, flying up and down the halls, his lab coat flapping around his legs.

"You saw the papers?" he asked, blowing on his coffee.

"The whole blessed world saw the papers," I dismally replied.

Sunday's front page was worse than Saturday evening's. The banner headline ran across the entire width of the top of the page, the letters about an inch high. The story included a sidebar about Lori Petersen and a photograph that looked as if it came from a yearbook. Abby Turnbull was aggressive enough, if not indecent, to attempt an interview with Lori Petersen's family, who lived in Philadelphia and "were too distraught to comment."

"It sure as hell isn't helping us any," Vander stated the obvious. "I'd like to know where the information's coming from so I could string a few people up by their thumbs."

"The cops haven't learned to keep their mouths shut," I told him. "When they learn to zip their lips, they won't have leaks to bitch about anymore."

"Well, maybe it's the cops. Whatever the case, the stuff's making my wife crazy. I think if we lived in the city, she'd make us move today."

He went to his desk, which was a jumble of computer printouts, photographs and telephone messages. There was a quart beer bottle and a floor tile with a dried bloody shoe print, both inside plastic bags and tagged as evidence. Randomly scattered about were ten small jars of formalin, each containing a charred human fingertip anatomically severed at the second joint. In cases of unidentified bodies that are badly burned or decomposed, it isn't always possible to get prints by the usual method. Incongruously stationed in the midst of this macabre mess was a bottle of Vaseline Intensive Care lotion.

Rubbing a dollop of the lotion on his hands, Vander pulled on a pair of white cotton gloves. The acetone, xylene and constant hand-washing that go with his trade were brutal on his skin, and I could always tell when he'd forgotten to put on gloves while using ninhydrin, a chemical helpful for visualizing latent prints, because he'd walk around with purple fingers for a week. His morning ritual complete, he motioned me to follow him out into the fourth-floor hallway.

Several doors down was the computer room, clean, almost sterile, and filled with light-silver modular hardware of various boxy shapes and sizes, bringing to mind a space-age Laundromat. The sleek, upright unit most closely resembling a set of washers and dryers was the fingerprint matching processor, its function to match unknown prints against the multimillion fingerprint data base stored on magnetic disks. The FMP, as it was known, with its advanced pipeline and parallel processing was capable of eight hundred matches per second. Vander didn't like to sit around and wait for the results. It was his habit to let the thing cook overnight so he had something to look forward to when he came to work the next morning.

The most time-consuming part of the process was what Vander did Saturday, feeding the prints into the computer. This required his taking photographs of the latent prints in question, enlarging them five times, placing a sheet of tracing paper over each photograph and with a felt-tip pen tracing the most significant characteristics. Next he reduced the drawing to a one-to-one-sized photograph, precisely correlating to the actual size of the print. He glued the photograph to a latent-print layout sheet, which he fed into the computer. Now it simply was a matter of printing out the results of the search.

Vander seated himself with the deliberation of a concert pianist about to perform. I almost expected him to flip up his lab coat in back and stretch his fingers. His Steinway was the remote input station, consisting of a keyboard, a monitor, an image scanner and a fingerprint image processor, among other things. The image scanner was capable of reading both ten-print cards and latent prints. The fingerprint image processor (or FIP, as Vander referred to it) automatically detected fingerprint characteristics.

I watched him type in several commands. Then he punched the print button, and lists of potential suspects were rapidly hammered across the green-striped paper.

I pulled up a chair as Vander tore off the printout and ripped the paper into ten sections, separating his cases.

We were interested in 88-01651, the identification number for the latents found on Lori Petersen's body. Computerized print comparison is analogous to a political election. Possible matches are called candidates, and ranked according to score. The higher the score, the more points of comparison a candidate has in common with the unknown latents entered into the computer. In the case of 88-01651 there was one candidate leading by a wide margin of more than one thousand points. This could mean only one thing.

A hit.

Or as Vander glibly put it, "A hot one."

The winning candidate was impersonally listed as NIC112.

I really hadn't expected this.

"So whoever left the prints on her has prints on file with the data base?" I asked.

"That's right."

"Meaning it's possible he has a criminal record?"

"Possible, but not necessarily."

Vander got up and moved to the verification terminal. He lightly rested his fingers on the keyboard and stared into the CRT display.

He added, "Could be he was printed for some other reason. If he's in law enforcement, or maybe applied for a taxi license once."

He began calling up fingerprint cards from the depths of image retrieval. Instantly, the search-print image, an enlarged aggregation of loops and whorls in turquoise blue, was juxtaposed to the candidate-print image. To the right was a column listing the sex, race, date of birth and other information revealing the can didate's identification. Producing a hard copy of the prints, he handed it over.

I studied it, read and reread the identity of NIC112.

Marino would be thrilled.

According to the computer, and there could be no mistake about it, the latents the laser picked up on Lori Petersen's shoulder were left by Matt Petersen, her husband.

Chapter 4

I was not unduly surprised that Matt Petersen touched her body. Often it is a reflex to touch someone who appears dead, to feel for a pulse or to grip a shoulder lightly the way one does to wake up the person. What dismayed me were two things. First, the latents were picked up because the individual who left them had a residue of the perplexing sparkles on his fingers – evidence also found in the previous strangling cases. Second, Matt Petersen's ten-print card had not been turned in to the lab yet. The only reason the computer got a hit was he already had prints on file with the data base.

I was telling Vander we needed to find out why and when Petersen was printed in the past, if he had a criminal record, when Marino walked in.

"Your secretary said you was up here," he announced by way of a greeting.

He was eating a doughnut I recognized as having come from the box by the coffee machine downstairs. Rose always brought in doughnuts on Monday mornings. Glancing around at the hardware, he casually shoved a manila envelope my way. "Sorry, Neils," he mumbled. "But the Doc here says she's got first dibs."

Vander looked curiously at me as I opened the envelope. Inside was a plastic evidence bag containing Petersen's tenprint card. Marino had put me on the spot, and I didn't appreciate it. The card, under ordinary circumstances, should have been receipted directly to the fingerprints lab – not to me. It is this very sort of maneuver that creates animosity on the part of one's colleagues.

They assume you're violating their turf, assume you're preempting them when, in truth, you may be doing nothing of the sort.

I explained to Vander, "I didn't want this left on your desk, out in the open where it might be handled. Matt Petersen supposedly was using greasepaint before he came home. If there was a residue on his hands, it may also be on his card."

Vander's eyes widened. The thought appealed to him. "Sure. We'll run it under the laser."

Marino was staring sullenly at me.

I asked him, "What about the survival knife?"

He produced another envelope from the stack wedged between his elbow and waist.

"Was on my way to take it to Frank." Vander suggested, "We'll take a look at it with the laser first."

Then he printed out another hard copy of NIC 112, the latents that Matt Petersen had left on his wife's body, and presented it to Marino.

He studied it briefly, muttering, "Ho-ly shit," and he looked up straight at me.

His eyes smiled in triumph. I was familiar with the look, which I had expected. It said, "So there, Ms. Chief: So maybe you got book-learning, but me, I know the street."

I could feel the investigative screws tightening on the husband of a woman who I still believed was slain by a man not known to any of us.

Fifteen minutes later, Vander, Marino and I were inside what was the equivalent of a darkroom adjoining the fingerprint lab. On a countertop near a large sink were the ten-print card and the survival knife. The room was pitch-black. Marino's big belly was unpleasantly brushing my left elbow as the dazzling pulses ignited a scattering of sparkles on the inky smudges of the card. In addition, there were sparkles on the handle of the knife, which was hard rubber and too coarse for prints.

On the knife's wide shiny blade was a smattering of virtually microscopic debris and several distinct partial prints that Vander dusted and lifted. He leaned closer to the ten-print card. A quick visual comparison with his eagle, expert eye was enough for him to tentatively say, "Based on an initial ridge comparison, they're his, the prints on the blade are Petersen's."

The laser went off, throwing us into complete blackness, and presently we were squinting in the rude glare of overhead lights that had suddenly returned us to the world of dreary cinder block and white Formica.

Pushing back my goggles, I began the litany of objective reminders as Vander fooled around with the laser and Marino lit a cigarette.

"The prints on the knife may not mean anything. If the knife belonged to Petersen, you'd expect to find his prints. As for the sparkling residue – yes, it's obvious he had something on his hands when he touched his wife's body and when he was fingerprinted. But we can't be sure the substance is the same as the glitter found elsewhere, particularly in the first three strangling cases. We'll give scanning electron microscopy a shot at it, hopefully determine if the elemental compositions or infrared spectrums are the same as those in the residues found on other areas of her body and in the previous cases."

"What?" Marino asked, incredulously. "You thinking Matt had one thing on his hands and the killer had something else, and they ain't the same but both look the same under the laser?"

"Almost everything that reacts strongly to the laser looks the same," I told him in slow, measured words. "It glows like white neon light."

"Yeah, but most people don't have white neon crap on their hands, to my knowledge."

I had to agree. "Most people don't."

"Sort of a weird little coincidence Matt just happens to have the stuff on his hands, whatever it is."

"You mentioned he'd just come home from a dress rehearsal," I reminded him.

"That's his story."

"It might not be a bad idea to collect the makeup he was using Friday night and bring it in for testing."

Marino stared disdainfully at me.

In my office was one of the few personal computers on the second floor. It was connected to the main computer down the hall, but it wasn't a dumb terminal. Even if the main computer was down, I could use my PC for word processing if nothing else.

Marino handed over the two diskettes found on the desk inside the Petersen bedroom. I slipped them into the drives and executed a directory command for each one.

An index of files, or chapters, of what clearly was Matt Petersen's dissertation appeared on the screen. The subject was Tennessee Williams, "whose most successful plays reveal a frustrating world in which sex and violence lie beneath the surface of romantic gentility," read the opening paragraph of the Introduction.

Marino was peering over my shoulder shaking his head.

"Jeez," he muttered, "this is only getting better. No wonder the squirrel freaked when I told him we was taking these disks in. Look at this stuff."

I rolled down the screen.

Flashing past were Williams's controversial treatments of homosexuality and cannibalism. There were references to the brutish Stanley Kowalski and to the castrated gigolo in Sweet Bird of Youth. I didn't need clairvoyant powers to read Marino's mind, which was as banal as the front page of a tabloid. To him, this was the stuff of garden-variety porn, the fuel of the psychopathic minds that feed on fantasies of sexual aberrancies and violence. Marino wouldn't know the difference between the street and the stage if he were pistol-whipped with a Drama 101 course.

The people like Williams, and even Matt Petersen, who create such scenarios rarely are the individuals who go around living them.

I looked levelly at Marino. "What would you think if Peterson were an Old Testament scholar?"

He shrugged, his eyes shifting away from me, glancing back at the screen. "Hey. This ain't exactly Sunday school material."

"Neither are rapes, stonings, beheadings and whores. And in real life, Truman Capote wasn't a mass murderer, Sergeant."

He backed away from the computer and went to a chair. I swiveled around, facing him across the wide expanse of my desk. Ordinarily, when he stopped by my office he preferred to stand, to remain on his feet towering over me. But he was sitting, and we were eye to eye. I decided he was planning to stay awhile.

"How about seeing if you can print out this thing? You mind? Looks like good bedtime reading."

He smiled snidely. "Who knows? Like, maybe this American lit freak quotes the Marquis Sade – what's-his-face in there, too."

"The Marquis de Sade was French."

"Whatever."

I restrained my irritation. I was wondering what would happen if one of my medical examiner's wives were murdered. Would Marino look in the library and think he'd struck pay dirt when he found volume after volume on forensics and perverse crimes in history? His eyes narrowed as he lit another cigarette and took a big drag. He waited until he'd blown out a thin stream of smoke before saying, "You've apparently got a high opinion of Petersen. What's it based on? The fact he's an artist or just that he's a hotshot college kid?"

"I have no opinion of him," I replied. "I know nothing about him except he doesn't profile right to be the person strangling these women."

He got thoughtful. "Well, I do know about him, Doe. You see, I talked to him for several hours."

He reached inside a pocket of his plaid sports jacket and tossed two microcassette tapes on the blotter, within easy reach of me. I got out my cigarettes and lit one, too.

"Let me tell you how it went down. Me and Becker are in the kitchen with him, okay? The squad's just left with the body when bingo! Peterson's personality completely changes. He sits up straighter in the chair, his mind clears, and his hands start gesturing like he's on stage or something. It was friggin' unbelievable.

His eyes tear up now and then, his voice cracks, he flushes and gets pale. I'm thinking to myself, this ain't an interview. It's a damn performance."

Settling back in the chair, he loosened his tie. "I'm thinking where I've seen this before, you know. Mainly back in New York with the likes of Johnny Andretti with his silk suits and imported cigarettes, charm oozing out his ears. He's so smooth you start falling all over yourself to accommodate 'im and begin suppressing the minor detail that he's whacked more than twenty people during his career. Then there's Phil the Pimp. He beat his girls with coat hangers, two of them to death, and tears up inside his restaurant, which is just a front for his escort service. Phil's all broken up about his dead hookers and he's leaning across the table, saying to me, 'Please find who did this to them, Pete. He has to be an animal. Here, try a little of this Chianti, Pete. It's nice.'

"Point is, Doc, I've been around the block more than once. And Petersen's setting off the same alarm toads like Andretti and Phil did. He's giving me this performance, I'm sitting there and asking myself, 'What's this Harvard highbrow think? I'm a bimbo or what?'

"I inserted a tape inside my microcassette player without saying anything.

Marino nodded for me to press the Play button. "Act one," he drolly announced. "The setting, the Petersen kitchen. The main character, Matt. The role, tragic. He's pale and wounded about the eyes, okay? He's staring off at the wall. Me? I'm seeing a movie in my head. Never been to Boston and wouldn't know Harvard from a hole in the ground, but I'm seeing old brick and ivy."

He fell silent as the tape abruptly began with Petersen mid-sentence. He was talking about Harvard, answering questions about when he and Lori had met. I'd heard my share of police interviews over the years, and this one was perplexing me. Why did it matter? What did Petersen's courting of Lori back in their college days have to do with her murder? At the same time I think a part of me knew.

Marino was probing, drawing Petersen out. Marino was looking for anything – anything – that might show Petersen to be obsessive and warped and possibly capable of overt psychopathy.

I got up to shut the door so we wouldn't be interrupted, as the recorded voice quietly went on.

"… I'd seen her before. On campus, this blonde carrying an armload of books and oblivious, as if she was in a hurry and had a lot on her mind."

Marino: "What was it about her that made you notice her, Matt?"

"It's hard to say. But she intrigued me from a distance. I'm not sure why. But part of it may have been that she was usually alone, in a hurry, on her way somewhere. She was, uh, confident and seemed to have purpose. She made me curious."

Marino: "Does that happen very often? You know, where you see some attractive woman and she makes you curious, from a distance, I'm saying?"

"Uh, I don't think so. I mean, I notice people just like everybody else does. But with her, with Lori, it was different."

Marino: "Go on. So you met her, finally. Where?"

"It was at a party. In the spring, early May. The party was in an off-campus apartment belonging to a buddy of my roommate, a guy who turned out to be Lori's lab partner, which was why she'd come. She walked in around nine, just about the time I was getting ready to leave. Her lab partner, Tim, I think was his name, popped open a beer for her and they started talking. I'd never heard her voice before. Contralto, soothing, very pleasant to listen to. The sort of voice that makes you turn around to find the source of it. She was telling anecdotes about some professor and the people around her were laughing. Lori had a way of getting everybody's attention without even trying."

Marino: "In other words, you didn't leave the party after all. You saw her and decided to stick around."

"Yes."

"What did she look like back then?"

"Her hair was longer, and she was wearing it up, the way ballet dancers do. She was slender, very attractive…"

"You like slender blondes, then. You find those qualities attractive in a woman."

"I just thought she was attractive, that's all. And there was more to it. It was her intelligence. That's what made her stand out."

Marino: "What else?"

"I don't understand. What do you mean?"

Marino: "I'm just wondering what attracted you to her." A pause. "I find it interesting."

"I can't really answer that. It's mysterious, that element. How you can meet a person and be so aware. It's as if something inside you wakes up. I don't know why… God… I don't know."