Lost Girls Part 11

Until that day, Kim had all but dropped out of the alliance of family members and friends. The more unavailable she had made herself, the more people blamed her for what had happened to Amber. In Florida, Louise Falvo-a friend of Amber's who helped take care of little Gabriel before he moved back with his mother-believed that Amber would have had a better chance at surviving if she'd never joined Kim in New York. "Kim is the biggest BS-er there is. How do you not know your freaking sister is missing?" she said. "Amber is very easily influenced, and Kim had a way of mesmerizing Amber. And Kim knew it and took advantage of it. And that's how Amber ended up the way she ended up."

Back in Wilmington, Amber's old friends Melissa Wright and Carl King had gone on about how Kim never saw her kids there, including her oldest, Marissa. "Me, personally, I can't go through a Christmas, let alone a birthday, without seeing my kids," said Carl. "I'm sorry, I just can't do it. Once I saw that Kim did that, I lost a lot of respect for her." Every few weeks, Melissa Wright posted on Kim's wall on Facebook, asking what she did with Amber's ashes or where she will put the headstone. She never got a reply. "We all just want to be able to say goodbye to her," Melissa said. "Because we were told she was going to bring her home and put her with her mom. I love Kim to death, but she needs to get her priorities straight and be honest."

Lorraine and Missy left Kim messages, too. Kim kept her distance from everyone, popping up briefly on Facebook, then disappearing again. All the drama around her might have explained why, a few days before Labor Day, Kim returned one of my messages, saying she wanted to tell her sister's story.

We met in midtown, near Penn Station. She said she had come in from Long Island, where she was living close to her old boyfriend Michael Donato's parents, John and Amy, who still had custody of the three children. I asked if John and Amy were all right with her being near the kids, considering everything that had happened. Kim nodded. "They know I come around," she said. "They do not like me doing anything like the escorting now, and if they think drugs are involved, they step in immediately. 'Let's go get tested.' And if something does pop up, they're like, 'Let's see what we can do to fix this problem immediately,' because they don't want the girls to be exposed to that s.h.i.t, and I understand. They love those girls like I love them. And I love them, too-I love John and Amy."

I asked if she'd been escorting lately. "I'm not gonna lie to you. I did this up until I went to North Carolina." That would be the previous fall, before she learned that Amber's body had been found. "I always fell back on it as fast money. Even when she was living with Dave and I needed money, I did a couple calls, too. I always fell back on it because it was such a good moneymaker for me."

She reminisced about her life with Amber-how they'd bonded as children. "We weren't that wild compared to some of the kids," said Kim, who, a moment later, mentioned getting stabbed one time and seeing a group of black girls try to jump her sister. "It's not that we were raw," she said. "We just knew how to survive at an early age." In less charitable moments, Kim said she always felt put upon by Amber. "Amber, she never turned her back on me. But she was selling me out a lot. If I talked s.h.i.t about Amber, I talked it to her face. I never talked s.h.i.t behind her back, and I never let anyone else talk s.h.i.t behind her back. And she was never like that. If somebody talked s.h.i.t about me behind my back, she would never say anything. Which p.i.s.sed me off, because I always stood up for her."

They were both plagued by addiction, with crazy adventures as business partners in between. "We traveled all up and down the East Coast" working as escorts: "Hilton Head, Florida, California, New Orleans." Kim kept focusing on the positive. "I tell you, I don't regret anything in life. Amber chose her path. You choose your own path. It's just the way it is. Or your path is chosen for you-I don't know, whichever. But everything has been a learning experience." She seemed determined, at least for the moment, to derive some sort of wisdom from what happened to Amber and what it said about her own life and her own choices. "I feel like, in order to make it, you gotta be able to make it on and off the streets. You gotta have both book sense and common sense. I'm not gonna say I have the best of both, but I have some of each, and it's what got me through."

When the check came, Kim insisted on paying. She pulled out a small cash-sized manila envelope packed with bills, glanced over at me, and smiled. I didn't ask where the money came from.

Using the same photo but a new phone number, Kim continued to post ads in the "adult entertainment-new york escorts" section of Backpage in September, October, and November: hi im 26 5ft two 115 lbs . . . brown hair honey eyes . . . 34c size 3 waist . . . so if u like a enjoyable non rushed expirence u can touch me In the middle was an ad that Kim posted in North Carolina on September 27, about the time she'd told me she was planning on visiting her daughter Marissa in Wilmington.

Missy Cann noticed the ads while doing her usual research on the Web. No one seemed to spend more time on the computer than Missy, monitoring the conversations on Longislandserialkiller.com, fielding instant messages and texts from new friends around the country, probing Joe Scalise Jr. for the latest neighborhood scuttleb.u.t.t, planning a vigil at Oak Beach in December for the first anniversary of the discovery of the bodies. Missy had thrown her hat in with all the others who, on Facebook, were voicing concern about Kim. When she saw the ads, Missy despaired. "It really makes me want to understand why she still does this," Missy said. "I wish Kim the best. I pray every night for her safety. It bothers me to no end to know what she is putting herself into. I mean, if I knew now what I did not know before Maureen went missing, I would have done everything in my power to stop her and help her out. I just feel like there must be something I can do to help."

To Missy, Kim had become a surrogate for Maureen. Yet part of what Missy said wasn't true. She'd known that her sister worked as an escort, and she had acknowledged it later, in conversations with other family members. To say she hadn't known enough about it seemed a little off. After living with it for so long, Missy, like all of the family members, was tempted to make some small adjustments to history, to ease her burden somehow.

Within a few weeks, it wasn't just Missy who knew that Kim was back doing calls. The A&E cable doc.u.mentary that had followed Mari to Oak Beach announced an airdate, December 5, and reporters got a sneak peek of Kim explaining on-camera that she was back escorting so she could lure and trap the Long Island serial killer. "From time to time I put up ads just to see what bites as far as my sister's killer goes," Kim said. " 'Cause it'll intrigue him. And that's what I'm hoping I'll do-catch his eye." She was in tears, but the grandiosity was hard to miss: The police had botched the job, so why shouldn't she go after him herself?

Even people who knew Kim were stunned. "Do you think what Kim did is absolutely r.e.t.a.r.ded?" Dave Schaller asked me on the phone. "I mean, what the h.e.l.l does she think is going to happen? She's going to be sitting there having s.e.x with somebody, and she's going to be able to stop this guy from strangling her?"

The full doc.u.mentary, once it aired, offered a long overview of the case and a few visits with family members. Mari made vague accusations about the people of Oak Beach (though Hackett wasn't mentioned by name). Lorraine criticized the Suffolk County police. Lynn lashed out at Craigslist. Missy went on about how Maureen needed money. There were some first-time TV appearances-Alex Diaz, framing as best he could the story of punching Shannan in the jaw; and Michael Pak, behind dark gla.s.ses, laboring to explain why he'd driven away without Shannan. But the real revelation, aside from Kim, was Richard Dormer coming forward after months of silence to announce that the Suffolk County police had a new theory.

"We believe it's one person," he said. "One killer."

With this theory, the commissioner was contradicting what the district attorney, Thomas Spota, had said months earlier about multiple killers. What changed Dormer's mind, he said, were how remains discovered along Ocean Parkway were found to be parts of bodies discovered elsewhere years earlier: Jessica Taylor in Manorville in 2003; the Jane Doe in Manorville in 2000; the body parts on Fire Island in April 1996. The body of the toddler turned out to be connected by DNA to yet another Jane Doe, dumped seven miles west of where the child was found, again off Ocean Parkway. To Dormer, it seemed the same killer had been using Ocean Parkway as one of many dump sites, then settled on it as the main dump site as time went on. "The theory is that it's a Long Islander," he said, someone so fluent in the area that he'd feel comfortable dumping bodies all along a forty-two-mile stretch from Manorville to Gilgo Beach.

In Dormer's view, this single killer had refined his technique over time. First he dismembered his victims and left parts in separate locations. With Maureen, Melissa, Megan, and Amber, he held on to them and apparently bagged them, intact, in burlap. That didn't explain why so many victims didn't fit the pattern of the four women in burlap. What about the Asian man in women's clothing and the small child? The man, Dormer said, could have been a prost.i.tute in drag. The toddler, Dormer said, could have accompanied his or her mother on a trick, something that isn't all that uncommon. Dormer said that the police's very inability to put names on those victims suggested that, like the others, they all lived so far off the grid. These last four were so similar, perhaps, because the killer had started using Craigslist and Backpage to vet his victims before meeting them. That way he could get exactly what he wanted.

The exception to the single-killer theory, Dormer said, was Shannan Gilbert. Unlike the others, Dormer said, Shannan hadn't been working alone. She had come to Long Island with a driver. That wouldn't have fit this killer's pattern. "There doesn't seem to be any connection," he said. "Everything is different. It is some coincidence that she went missing in the same area where the bodies were found. But when you look at her closely and you look at the evidence, Shannan Gilbert is a separate case."

With this, Dormer seemed to be saying not just that the killer hadn't murdered Shannan but that she might not even be a victim. Her body still hadn't been found. In the following days, even some of the officers working under Dormer were said to doubt the commissioner's one-killer theory. The only one Dormer thought wasn't connected to any of the others, he said, was the one whose disappearance started it all.

Many family members were as perplexed as they were angry. After months of silence, to casually mention on a TV show that the police didn't think Shannan was connected? Even Dormer's air of certainty-and his statement's timing, so soon before his expected retirement at the end of December-made him sound a lot like a man trying to wrap things up before heading out the door.

I wish I could grab them all by the throats and shake the s.h.i.t out of them, Lorraine wrote on Facebook, and make them talk and explain why they have lied to us.

The night Dormer's theory made the news, Kim called me. She sounded angry, unraveling. "The cops don't know s.h.i.t. They're just frontin'. If they had information, they'd have an arrest." She did not buy the one-killer theory. She'd been out there, seen how desolate it could be. She viewed Gilgo Beach as a giant dumping ground, like the swamps of New Jersey or the hills of Staten Island. It wasn't so hard for her to imagine that more than one person would pick a place like the barrier islands to leave a body. "The four girls are together," she said, all killed by the same man. "But the other girls are chopped up and don't fit the same MO. And Shannan Gilbert is a fluke."

Kim rambled, sounding more vulnerable as time went on. She talked about getting sucked back into the life-not just calls but drugs, too-and she admitted it wasn't working out. Since our lunch in September, she said she'd checked herself in to Talbot House, a twenty-eight-day rehab in Bohemia, Long Island. I was surprised to hear this, since I'd noticed Kim had posted an escort ad that very morning.

Sounding tearful, Kim said she'd lost the only person who ever really understood her, more than any parent could. Now that she was alone, she thought she might be the only one with the knowhow and the connections to be able to solve the case and find the killer. But Kim said her solo investigation had netted her one lead so far: a girl who got an outcall from a guy who wanted to talk about nothing but the serial killer. The lead was going nowhere, and she was tired and frustrated. "Usually, when I bring it up, guys don't want to talk about it at all." She said she wanted to stop; if she didn't think that Amber would have done the same thing for her, she probably would quit.

I asked Kim if she'd heard from her oldest daughter, Marissa, and her tone shifted again. "Yeah, I talked to her," she said, her voice distant, as if she'd shut herself down. "I'm trying to push her away from me, so I won't do to her what I did to Amber." Kim was rejecting her for her daughter's own protection, although it was possible she simply felt unworthy of her daughter's-or anyone's-love. "Marissa is fifteen years old and gorgeous," Kim said. "And she looks like she's nineteen. He would go after her in a minute. It'd be a wrap at that point. Collateral damage. I don't doubt he wouldn't go after her." Like Dave Schaller, she felt exposed after appearing on television. "Like, I'm telling you, if he didn't know who I was, he does now. That's for d.a.m.n sure."

Kim's new plan, she said, was to lay a wreath for Amber at Oak Beach. Missy and Lorraine had set a date for a vigil on December 13, 2011, the first anniversary of the discovery of the first of the four bodies. Melissa's family couldn't afford to come, but Kritzia would carry the flag for them. Kim said she would join them all, reuniting with the families. Then she would say goodbye to Amber, stop looking for her, and stop doing calls forever.

"Every day, it eats at me," she said, determined but fragile. "I went through a really hard time, and I really gotta maintain."

Kim claimed to be working round the clock on behalf of her sister. What went unsaid was how she hadn't been there for Amber before she'd gone missing; she hadn't even called the police. "You have to understand," Bear had told me. "Kim is a f.u.c.king crackhead and a prost.i.tute, too. That's how she gets her money. These Craigslist ads, these Backpage ads, these postings and listings and all this s.h.i.t, man."

Amber's old boyfriend Bjrn Brodsky was living in Manhattan now, crashing in stairwells and on street corners around Tompkins Square Park. He was still skinny-rail-thin, really-and he slouched as he walked, loping like a camel. It takes a while to gather that he is six feet tall. Where his hair had been almost shoulder-length and dark when he lived on America Avenue, now it was short and bleached blond, poorly. He'd made the change, he said, because he'd been ejected from a court-ordered rehab, and the fact that he hadn't found another rehab had led to a warrant for his arrest. "It's like f.u.c.king Ponyboy and s.h.i.t. You know, The Outsiders? I read a lot, you know? I read a lot of books."

The East Village neighborhood around Bear was gentrified now. Apartments went for millions, and the park even had a playground. But the southwest corner of Tompkins Square Park, near Avenue A and Seventh Street, was still known as Crusty Row. Crustys are society dropouts, and famously so: covered with tattoos and piercings, and several rungs further out of the mainstream than Deadheads or Phish-heads or those who used to be East Village squatters. Bear walked among the Crustys and was largely accepted, though he was not one of them. He could supply them with dope when they wanted it, and that counted for something. "If you're homeless in New York," he said, "no place is better than the Lower East Side. I just have enough swag to be out there on Avenue D. I get along with everyone. I'm a likable person. I'm a good person. I have a good heart. I get arrested, I'm not f.u.c.king snitching. I'll eat that. I'll go to jail. I don't deal with f.u.c.king cops. I don't do that s.h.i.t."

He was not in touch with Dave, though he said he loved him like a brother. Even Kim he still liked, though he recognized her limitations. "I'm not saying Kim is a bad person, because she's not," he said. "But even if Amber was strung out, she'd still give you the shirt off her back. She'd do anything in the world." That was how she differed from her sister. "Amber cared about others. That's just the bottom line of it. Amber cared about others; Kim cares about herself."

Did Kim treat Amber well?

"Kim used Amber a lot, I think," Bear said.

How?

"To her advantage, you know what I mean? Through these postings, and these ads, you know? She used Amber to keep that house available to her at all times. A lot of manipulating. A lot of lies." He was quick to add that there were deceptions all around. Amber, he said, "would have to act like she was on the phone with Kim to calm down Dave," who couldn't stand the way Kim ignored her little sister. Even so, "Dave was so blindly in love with Kim. That man loved this woman more than you could possibly know. Like, Dave is the biggest sucker for love there is in this world."

As he went on, Bear made it clear that Kim hadn't been the only one to fail Amber. He didn't call the police, either. And yet he knew how much she loved him.

"For some reason, I was her number one priority. I wanted her to learn to love herself a little bit."

It didn't take long for Bear to turn sorrowful, and when he did, he employed the vernacular of rehab, perhaps because he thought that was the format in which I would best receive it, or maybe it was a way of connecting with the memory of meeting Amber. "My choices have ruined my life," he said. "My life is in shambles."

In his twenty-seven years, Bear had been in rehab for alcohol, Xanax, crack, intravenous cocaine, weed, and dope. "I'm no longer opiate-dependent," he said proudly-which, to clarify, meant to Bear that he was down to a bag of heroin a day. "And I don't shoot it. I sniff it. Once in the morning, every other couple of days." He circled back to rehab again and again, coming up with new reasons not to bother trying. "I've gone to every hospital, every rehab, every detox in this f.u.c.king city more than once, and it's never worked. It's rough, man. I got real bad post-traumatic stress. And that whole thing with Amber did not help at all."

II.

THE DOCTOR.

In December, they started searching the bramble again. The announcement from the police came on November 30, just one day after Dormer made public his theory that one killer murdered them all except Shannan. Now the police were saying they had information that Shannan's body might be at Gilgo Beach after all-out along the parkway, not far from where the first four bodies were found.

To Mari and the others, this felt like more window dressing, a chance to demonstrate that the case was alive as the anniversary approached. Then again, they couldn't just ignore it. What if the police were acting on a new tip?

In a few days, the police settled that question when a spokesperson said the new search was about information they'd been sitting on for months. The high-resolution aerial photography conducted by the FBI in the spring had yielded a few questionable spots-"ninety points of interest," they called them-that they'd decided needed reexamination. The spokesperson said they had to wait until the brush thinned out in winter to search again.

To the families, this inspired even less confidence: Allowing a serial killer to remain on the loose is all right as long as a cop doesn't get poison ivy? Again they felt shunted aside: If the victims had been from middle-cla.s.s homes in gated beach communities, the response from police, they a.s.sumed, would have been different.

On Monday, December 5, in heavy fog, seven teams from the New York state and Na.s.sau and Suffolk County police forces were back along the northern shoulder of Ocean Parkway, searching the bramble. Oak Beach was a media magnet all over again. No neighbors were commenting except Joe Scalise, Jr., and his father. They were hopeful about answers, even as they remained confident that the police were searching in the wrong place. If nothing else, Joe Jr. said, it put a little heat on their neighbor. "The FBI has a camera now on Hackett's house," he said. His father said Hackett had been seen at a local Chase bank branch, trying to get another mortgage. A rumor was circulating that he was planning to pull up stakes and relocate to Florida.

In rare agreement with the Scalises, Gus Coletti also suspected that the police were out searching on the highway just to look good. "If you go down there right now and you ask them, they'll all tell you the same thing: 'We're going through the motions.' "

It seemed as good a time as any to walk down Anchor Way to Larboard Court and knock on the doctor's door.

The doctor's home is small but charming, a beach bungalow with a sign over the entrance that reads BE NICE OR LEAVE. I knock a few times before he limps to the door; I can see him coming through a tall vertical window next to the threshold. He looks younger than he seemed in the photos and TV news clips, and I'm reminded that he is still only in his mid-fifties. His hair is messy and graying, but his face is boyish. The stubble on his face does little to conceal the patchiness of his skin. His eyes are wider, more spaniel-like, in person than they seemed on television. Between the limp and the potbelly, it isn't easy to imagine him as a master criminal who bewitches young women and controls a small community.

When the door opens, I see his half-smile. Maybe this is a doctor's self-regard or a wince of pain from his prosthesis. Or maybe he's frustrated by yet another knock. He wasn't expecting me; I came back to Oak Beach because of the rebooted search for bodies, and I hoped to hear from Hackett himself about the rumors.

He seems annoyed from the start, irritated, ready to say no. He shakes his head and says he's turned down many requests for comment. He says there's no sense trying to disprove things that are so obviously not true: "What would be the point?" he says, as if it's the most ridiculous question in the world.

Then, suddenly, he glances left and right. "This is ridiculous," he says. "Come on in."

It's not at all clear, at least to me, what changed his mind. Some people simply aren't comfortable not talking, and Hackett seems to be one of those. The unfortunate by-product of this impulse is that he can come off as a dissembler, even when he might not be. He overanswers questions to the point where it seems like he's hiding something, because he's gone out on a limb, talking about things he doesn't know anything about. Some might say that's because he's a blowhard-or, as Laura Coletti charitably puts it, an overelaborator. Others, like the Scalises and Mari, would say it's because he is hiding something.

Hackett offers a tour. He heads straight back, and as he enters the next room, he snaps, "Here's my clinic." Then, quickly, he says he's joking; he's referring to the rumor that he treated Shannan here. It's a storage room, neat but lived in-he calls it "a workroom"-filled with years of boxes and tools and belongings ama.s.sed by a large family. Hackett limps swiftly through a doorway to a back room that contains a bed and an easel and paintings made by Hackett's daughter Mary Ellen, who is visiting for the holidays. Around a corner is a folded futon couch with a pillow and comforter on it. That's for his son, he says. His two daughters, both in their twenties, are living on their own now, though he'll later say that one daughter, along with his wife, was there the morning when Shannan disappeared.

He heads out of the room and up a short staircase to the main room of the house, a double-height living room that sits right in the entryway, capturing the southern light from large slanted windows. The room has a galley kitchen in the far corner, opening up to a table with barstools. The table is indeed large enough and at a good height to double as an examination table, as the doctor once said. We sit on the stools. The far wall of the room is floor-to-ceiling with books, including a copy of Writers Market. Hackett says offhandedly that his father was a writer.

As he talks, Hackett insists that the whole controversy about him does not usually occupy a second of his time or attention. He says that, contrary to the gossip, no neighbors called him the night Shannan went running down the street, pounding on doors. In fact, he says that days later he told Gus Coletti and Barbara Brennan that they should have called him; that he might have been able to help the girl. It strikes me when he puts it this way that this quite possibly could be what Bruce Anderson really overheard: Hackett saying he would have treated Shannan if he'd seen her, not that he had treated her, the way Joe Jr. believed. I wonder if Hackett had said the same sort of thing to Mari on the phone-not that he had helped Shannan but that he wished he had helped her.

Even that wouldn't explain Hackett denying ever having spoken to Mari, then later admitting as much. That could have been his haplessness, or it could have been a deception. Yet as Hackett answers more questions, he continues to be fuzzy on information that he should have figured out stock responses to a long time ago. He says the first time he heard anything about Shannan was several days after she disappeared, when Alex Diaz and Michael Pak came to the neighborhood with flyers. He suggests that he felt a little sorry for them. "They were nice guys, but they didn't know how to go about getting information from people." He says he told them to go to the local police where Shannan lived and to report her missing, and then he gave them his card and told them he'd be happy to help out if they needed anything. He remembers thinking that "from a police standpoint, this was not a child that has gone missing." In other words, she was a grown-up, and the police might be inclined to think she'd gone off somewhere on her own and would come back when she felt like it. It never occurred to him that anything else would come of it. "This is a twentysomething woman who has disappeared before," he says. "Or at least that's what I understood."

He remembers all of this. But he doesn't remember the call he made to Mari. At first he says he didn't speak with Mari on the phone, when he clearly admitted that in his letters to 48 Hours. A moment later, he acknowledges that there is a phone record confirming that he and Mari had spoken.

"I don't know. It's a possibility someone called. I don't want to appear to be disputing what she said. I get thirty-five calls a day. I don't know if maybe she called me to talk. But I never saw the girl. I never talked to the girl. I don't have any recollection of talking to the mother."

Out of nowhere, he recalls something else. "Hold it," he says. "It's possible she called me and I called her back wondering who she was. It was a three-minute phone call."

In a way, you could argue that this is refreshing honesty-guilelessness. But in the middle of a murder investigation, with his name all over the news and police searching the bramble on a beach three miles away, it is also a little foolish. And yet it's impossible for me to tell if it is because he's genuinely hiding something or because he is naive about just how eager some people are to pin Shannan's disappearance on him. I can't help but think of Richard Jewell, who discovered the pipe bomb at the Atlanta Olympics only to be fingered for a long time as the bomber. Is Hackett the Richard Jewell of the Long Island serial-killer case? Or is he Joel Rifkin?

Hackett continues to insist that the whole line of inquiry is ridiculous. "I'm a family pract.i.tioner: an emergency physician, a former director of emergency medicine for Suffolk County, New York, and then emergency department director at Central Suffolk Hospital. Can you imagine my putting my reputation on the line, saying I ran a clinic?"

For a moment, it's possible to sense Hackett's plight and even sympathize. He's a talker. Maybe he said something Mari misinterpreted, something about how he works in emergency medicine and knows about rehabs. Everyone knows that Hackett has enemies in the neighborhood; maybe those enemies are only too happy to believe he's up to no good and that there's a cover-up. Is it possible that this is a perfect storm of gossip and the doctor had nothing to do with it at all?

He throws up his hands. How does one prove that one is, in fact, not a murderer? "I've been over this so many times, it doesn't get clearer with repet.i.tion," Hackett says. The best he can hope for is to be forgotten. "All you're doing is trying to tread lightly and lightly and more and more lightly until you recede into the background and eventually no one can see you anymore."

I ask about the security video. Hackett sighs. "The police wanted the security video. The police took the security video. Being on the board, I saw when the police told the board they wanted it. So yes, we gave it to them."

Did he have a look at it beforehand?

"Of course, early on we said we should be looking at the security video. But that would be tampering with evidence."

I stay an hour. He answers every question. The doctor and I shake hands. We agree to stay in touch.

And twenty-four hours later, the police find Shannan's belongings in the marsh behind his house.

THE MARSH.

The largest marsh in Oak Beach-forty-nine acres, about the same size as the inhabitable portion of the community-borders Anchor Way, where Shannan was last seen, and Larboard Court, where the Hacketts live. With every storm, the marsh fills up like a bathtub with rainwater, then drains through pipes beneath the roads of Oak Beach, down toward the old Oak Beach Inn parking lot and eventually into the Fire Island Inlet. At least that's what is supposed to happen. In reality, the pipes get crushed by storms or clogged with sediment, and the marsh fills even higher, until the ground starts to look like muck and the cordgra.s.s and reeds and poison ivy grow so thick that no resident would ever try to hack through it.

The mosquitoes come next. They like nothing better than a freshwater marsh. The mosquitoes multiply, and so do the ticks, and the people of Oak Beach cry out for help from the town of Babylon. Every few decades, the town acquiesces and sends a team from Vector Control to dredge the marsh, building and repairing drainage ditches. You can see the trenches in aerial view: a long one down the middle and short splints off to the sides, like a spine with little ribs. As Joe Scalise, Jr., pointed out, one of those ribs runs right behind Hackett's cottage-a trench that anyone running through the marsh at night wouldn't see.

The marsh and the people of Oak Beach have coexisted this way for over a century. In the early nineties, the town of Babylon ceded control of the marsh to the state of New York in a land swap; in return, the town got control of a portion of the Oak Beach parking lot, which it intended to transform into a public park. Just before that happened, in 1989, the town dug out the mosquito ditches one last time. A main drainpipe to the inlet was replaced with a new pipe that lacked a flapper valve-meaning that in the decades since, salt water has drifted up into the freshwater marsh. Salt meadow cordgra.s.s followed. So did salt gra.s.s and common reed, along with the seaside lavender, black gra.s.s, marsh elder, groundsel bush, and more poison ivy.

The marsh became a Frankenstein of plant life, universally avoided by the people of Oak Beach. Everything grew there, and no one ever seemed to go in. Until, on a cold morning in December, eighteen months after Joe Brewer's last party on the Fairway, the police, John Mallia and his dog, Blue, among them, discovered-nearly fully intact, just steps from the shoulder of Ocean Parkway-the remains of Shannan Gilbert.

They found her purse first, with her identification inside. Then they went back and found a phone, some shoes, and a torn pair of jeans. They could get in now because of the repairs, which had drained the marsh for the first time in decades. Inspector Stuart Cameron of the Suffolk County police said that the pipe "drastically increased our visibility in there and a.s.sisted us in being able to find things."

The police chose that day, December 6, to search the marsh because the tide seemed low. They used a large amphibious vehicle for the densest areas and cut new trails with a brush hog, a rotary mower with blades on hinges so they bounced up and over rocks and stumps. Ten officers went in on foot behind the vehicles, using brush cutters-high-powered WeedWackers-to clear paths. A dozen more came in with dogs. Rounding out the search party were six emergency services personnel and three members of the crime-scene unit. A few of the officers used metal detectors in the muck. Some of them reported working in waist-deep water and getting stuck.

"She's in there someplace," Dormer said at a press conference in the Oak Beach parking lot. It was late afternoon and misty and rainy and cold as the commissioner spoke, vowing to keep looking "into the foreseeable future . . . Hopefully, we will find the remains."

With Shannan's belongings as his first solid clue but still no body, the commissioner wasted no time fitting it into his theory. He said that Shannan was high that night, and paranoid, and she ran into the marsh, seeing the lights of the cars from Ocean Parkway beyond it. But in her condition, he said, Shannan had no concept that those cars were as far as a quarter mile away, and since she didn't know the area, she had no idea that she was about to fling herself into a dense, murky marsh that even the neighbors avoided. So, Dormer concluded, Shannan tripped-most likely in a drainage ditch-and drowned.

If this was true, it would be amazing, almost poetic irony. First Shannan's disappearance leads to the discovery of ten other sets of remains, and then the hunt for the serial killer makes Shannan's case so prominent that police have to come back to Oak Beach and search for her. Without the serial-killer case, they might have called off the search for Shannan. But without her, they might never have known there was a serial killer.

The girls all found one another.

Even if they did find Shannan's body in that ditch, there were many questions-chief among them, who killed the other girls? The people of Oak Beach would still have a lot to answer for. What happened in Joe Brewer's house that made her feel so threatened? When she and Brewer left the house briefly, were they buying drugs? If so, from whom? Once she came back, what happened that made her want to run away not just from Brewer but from her own driver? And did some neighbors-if not Hackett, then anyone-see her before she disappeared in the marsh?

Most of the people of Oak Beach had spent the better part of a year denying that she was there, behaving as if something horrible hadn't happened in their secluded beach community. Now there was proof that something had.

The police showed the belongings to Mari, who confirmed that the pocketbook and phone were Shannan's. Then she hunkered down at home, avoiding reporters, consumed with grief. Her family and friends were puzzling over the convenient timing of this search and the discovery, so close to Dormer's retirement. Some were wondering about Hackett. Mostly, they didn't want to believe that Shannan just wandered off and got lost and tripped and died. They wanted her death to mean something, and they wanted a culprit.

A day pa.s.sed, and the police found nothing. Another day pa.s.sed, and Shannan was still missing. When the weekend came, some of them harbored hope that Shannan wasn't there; that she wasn't even dead. "I'd rather her be alive somewhere," said Shannan's sister Sarra.

All the families were angry and bound together by that anger. Soon they were all declaring love and loyalty for one another. The most prolific was Kritzia Lugo, who, never having met any of the women in person, told the story in a long string of Facebook comments on how each one of them had saved her. Many of them replied to Kritzia, and soon they were all feeling it.

KRITZIA LUGO It's weird but I learned from you guys one night I was so sad it was late I called Melissa Cann and she was there for me!

MELISSA CANN I will always be there for you . . . And I know it is likewise with you also. :) KRITZIA LUGO That time I cut my wrist and was in the hospital for like a week Melissa Brock Wright was there for me it was late but I got to tell her all I was feeling KRITZIA LUGO Dawn Barthelemy talks to me once in a while and gives me advice KRITZIA LUGO Mari Gilbert showed me that there are mother's out there who do love their children MELISSA BROCK WRIGHT None of us will ever have to fight any battle alone! We are all a unit, and if one of us is having a hard time then we all are. If someone messes with one of us then they're messing with all of us!

KRITZIA LUGO Kim Overstreet showed me the power of sisterhood when she is willing to sacrifice her life to get her sis justice MELISSA CANN Yes I agree KRITZIA LUGO Sherre Gilbert showed me children are a blessing-don't be so uptight-love them and learn how to have fun with them and enjoy them Mari hung Christmas decorations around her place in Ellenville: garland around the fence, lights hung from the porch, and giant plastic candy canes on the lawn. In the middle was a pink sign: ALL I WANT FOR CHRISTMAS IS YOU. "Christmas is about dreams, dreaming, wishes coming true," Mari told a Newsday reporter. The sign included a map of the Gilgo Beach area and a list of names: Jessica Taylor, Melissa Barthelemy, Megan Waterman, Maureen Barnes, Amber Lynn Costello. "They're my extended family now," Mari said.

Mari's youngest daughter, Stevie, was there, too, helping to decorate the home. She told the reporter that the family would put up a stocking for Shannan, and that she believed Shannan was still alive. Even if Shannan's remains were found, Stevie said, "there's never going to be closure unless I have her home. I'm just praying that Shannan comes home."

Taking advantage of the press attention, Mari noted a few inconsistencies in the search. She said she wasn't able to confirm that the shoes belonged to Shannan, who'd been seen in strappy sandals earlier that night, and the police had found what looked like ballet slippers. She said she believed that Shannan's things were planted in the marsh-by whom, she wouldn't say. She couldn't be sure of anything until Shannan was found, and even then, she vowed to fight. "I think Dormer just wants to find the remains, say she drowned, and close the case before he retires. That's what I feel, but I'm not gonna let that happen."

The question hung over every Facebook thread for days: Could Shannan really have run into a marsh and died?

"I mean, that would just be my f.u.c.kin' luck," Kim said.

On the phone that week from her place on Long Island, Kim said she could see Shannan being c.o.ked up and paranoid enough to run away from Michael Pak; Kim had been in situations a little like that. "And she's bipolar," she said. "Whatever meds she's taking for that, there are just some things you can't mix together. I know that through experience, with myself and my sister. My sister would have drug-induced seizures. Some people have drug-induced schizophrenia. I've seen that s.h.i.t."

Which brought Kim to the purpose of her call. She'd been thinking of calling the detectives and turning them on to a menacing trick she'd had not long before Amber disappeared. "It weighs on me heavy," she said. "My instincts are usually not too wrong." The john was all the way out on the East End of Long Island. He gave her five hundred for the hour and wanted full service. Dave Schaller was with her, so she said no to the date. But the next day he called and offered another four hundred, "and he says he's going to score some rock."

She went. He was a white guy, he drove a truck, and he said he owned a tugboat business. He lived in a bas.e.m.e.nt apartment, nothing spectacular. Inside, he showed Kim a box of d.i.l.d.os, "probably a hundred different vibrators and women's s.h.i.t. And that struck me as weird at first, but some guys get off on it, so it didn't strike me too hard." Where things turned scary, she said, was when she gave him full service; that was when he reached for her throat. "Some guys do this," Kim said. "Some guys like to do it, but I don't like it. You're not going to do to it to me. That can change the situation real quick. And I didn't let it go farther than it did, so I got up and told him, 'I'm not comfortable, I'm leaving, and you're not getting your money back. That was uncalled for.' "

Kim said she left and didn't think anything of it. They texted afterward but never met up again. A few days before Amber vanished, Kim said she told her sister about him and pa.s.sed along his number. "I told her I had some guy," she said. "I'd seen him twice and I made a G off him in two days. I was like, 'I'm not guaranteeing anything, but you can try it.' I told her that he was kind of an a.s.shole. But we never said anything else about him." Now she can't help but wonder: "Did she call him that week, or maybe she called him and he called her back? You know what I'm saying?"

The story, as she told it, seemed a little wobbly: Kim had been afraid of this john at the time, but not so afraid that she wouldn't pa.s.s the lead along to her sister? No matter: She wanted to find him again, confront him directly: "How do I know you didn't do it? What were you doing that night?" So far, she hadn't been able to find anyone to go with her to find his house. Ever since she'd appeared on the A&E show, all her crack and escort connections had been avoiding her. "They think I put myself out there too much," she said. "My dealers are like, 'What the f.u.c.k?' I'm like, 'My sister got killed! Every man for their f.u.c.king self at this point. s.h.i.t!' "

The killer dominated her thoughts. She'd decided that he was thinking about her, too. "It eats at me every day. I dream about this f.u.c.king guy. It's a war right now between him and me." She was talking even faster. "This is the rest of my life. It's all I think about day and f.u.c.king night. I cannot shake it. I can't. Because if it was Amber here, that b.i.t.c.h would be on TV every two days, they would lock her up just to keep her from getting the publicity. I'm telling you, that's how she was. She was a crusader. She was a moneymaker. If there's something to make from it, she's going to make it. And I'm telling you, she would f.u.c.king do it. So how can I not, you know what I'm saying? It ruined my life. It took almost my whole heart out of my chest. It's ruined my f.u.c.king life. It's put me back out on the streets. I'm running as hard as I was from day one."

She'd been fighting some version of this war long before the killer entered her life. She'd been running since she was a little girl, since Coed Connection and maybe before that. So had Amber. They ran together. They hustled together. Those guys Amber and her friends robbed, they had it coming. "They got treated the way they treated her, and that's just the way it is," Kim said. "That's life. A lot of people don't understand that. But it's because there's war in the streets, for any type of hustle, whether it's drugs, whether it's guns, whether it's a.s.s, whatever, it doesn't matter. It's the same war. It's war. And people don't realize that, and they live their normal little lives and stuff. Girls on the Backpage, it's not a f.u.c.king choice, it's a last resort. It's a white-knuckle way of survival. It's just the way it is."

I told Kim that her friends were worried about her. They didn't want another victim. They didn't want another death.