Lost Girls Part 10

Hackett refused to be interviewed on-camera. In two written responses to CBS, he said merely that he called Mari at Alex Diaz's request, to offer to help with the search. On the face of it, this timing would make more sense than Mari's claim that he'd called just after Shannan went missing. Hackett said the longest call lasted under four minutes. While he said he couldn't quite recall what was said, his memory was apparently strong enough for him to continue to deny ever telling Mari that he ran a rehab or home for wayward girls, and to deny that he ever saw Shannan. He said the same thing to Newsday just before the broadcast: "I had nothing to do with anything occurring the night Shannan went missing. I never saw her that night; she never came to my house, I never offered her a.s.sistance."

His coming forward only made him a larger target. The Websleuths world pa.r.s.ed the wording of Hackett's letters, making much of how he'd refused to take a polygraph, citing health issues. If I picked this suspect out of a hat, I agree it would be coincidence, but we didn't, Truthspider crowed. He is one of three men directly tied to the May 1 incident, but is the only one of them who refuses to take a poly, changed his alibi multiple times, lied to everyone for a prolonged period of time, can be connected to the areas of the dump sites, and whose parameters fit that of the serial killer: cla.s.sic post-crime behavior, age, intellect, capacity, knowledge of law-enforcement tactics, etc. The police continued to maintain that Hackett was not a suspect. But for Mari, blood was in the water. The doctor had lied; how could you believe anything he said after he'd spent a year saying the phone call never happened?

On August 19, a sunny summer Sunday, Mari and a small entourage staged another offensive at Oak Beach. No family members were with her this time, just her old friend Johanna Gonzalez; the British film crew working on the A&E doc.u.mentary; and some new friends from Long Island she'd made through Facebook who had become devoted to Shannan's case: a Glen Cove resident named Michele Kutner and a Ma.s.sapequa native named Mike Dougherty, who, on Facebook, darkly calls himself Jim Jones. The publicity had also brought two local psychics into Mari's life-Cristina Pena and Joe Agostinello-and they came to Oak Beach, too. Jim Jones later recalled that when they got to the spot on Anchor Way where Shannan was last seen, Joe the psychic, who is Hispanic and Native American, took out a crystal pendulum, let its chain hang from between his index finger and thumb, and watched its movements carefully as the late-day sun moved through it. "Something happened here," Joe said, his voice rich and deep. "I'm picking up a whole lot of vibrations right here."

They were standing next to the marsh.

They continued down Anchor Way to where it intersects with a road called the Bayou. This was supposedly where Shannan's jacket was found. Joe shook his head. "I felt more back the other way," he said.

They decided to walk up toward Hackett's house, a Cape-style cottage, raised high with a carport at the ground level. Mari wanted to knock on Hackett's door and confront him. Before she had the chance, the doctor appeared down the road, lumbering toward them from a neighbor's house.

Mari stood as the man she'd been thinking and talking about for over a year walked toward her, his hand outstretched. A portion of the encounter was caught on video. Hackett was wearing a deep blue polo s.h.i.+rt tucked in, accentuating his big belly. His white shorts showed off his prosthetic leg.

Hackett was surprised to learn the woman whose hand he was shaking was Shannan Gilbert's mother. As soon as Mari introduced herself, he grimaced, looking this way and that as she and others in her group fired questions at him.

"What I don't understand is, what happened?" Mari said. "Did you see anything? What did you hear?"

"I never saw her," Hackett said evenly. "I never met her."

Mari's friend Johanna spoke up. "You must have heard something, because everybody here has heard something, one way or another. What's the rumor you heard?"

Hackett squinted at her. "Rumor?"

"Everyone's heard a rumor here," said Johanna.

"What's been on the news," Hackett said, shrugging. "That's it."

"Yeah," Mari said, "but this is my question. You called me. And for over a year you denied it."

"I didn't deny it," Hackett said.

"When there was proof you did call me, you admitted it," said Mari.

Michele Kutner spoke next. "But you never saw her that night? You never heard?"

"Didn't hear, didn't do anything," Hackett said. "Whoever Alex asked me to call, I called. All of this stuff about a rehab or something? I don't have any rehab. I don't do rehabs."

"Then why would you say that to me?" Mari asked.

"I didn't," Hackett said, some irritation coming through.

"But my point is this," said Mari. "How can we not know in another year it will be proven that you did say that to me?"

That startled Hackett. "I didn't say anything!" he answered. He glanced at the camera crew. "If you want to talk, I'd be happy to chat with you, but not with whatever this is."

What happened next, as Jim Jones remembers it, amazed them all. Someone in the group wished they'd brought some water, and the doctor's wife, Barbara, invited them all inside. Mari and Jim took her up on the offer as Hackett stayed outside with the others. As they walked in, Mari's body shook, and she clasped Jim's hand for support. They saw Hackett's daughter's paintings, and detective novels on the tall bookshelves in the living room.

The doctor's wife did her best to show some sympathy for Mari. She said she couldn't imagine what she was going through. Then she talked about the pressure her husband had been under-the media a.s.sault, the constant questioning. She recounted her husband's life of selfless service: Countless times, she told them, he wouldn't make it home for dinner because he was out helping someone who needed a.s.sistance in one way or another.

Asked about the security video, Barbara said it ran on a two-week loop and got taped over automatically. That was all.

On her way out of the house, Mari finally lost control and started sobbing. In the months to come, she'd get angrier, returning for Shannan's birthday in October. She was backed into a corner. Nothing anyone said would alter her conviction that the conspiracy was real.

ALLIANCES.

"That girl standing there?" Kritzia said. "She's working. And the guy in front of her is her pimp."

We were standing on Seventh Avenue at about one-thirty A.M., across the street from Lace, the strip club. She and her friend Melissa used to spend hours on end on this corner. Kritzia was tiny, plump, and sultry, with bright red lips and wild hair. But she was dressed conservatively, like a mom at a PTA meeting. Since hearing about Melissa's death, she'd sworn off working as an escort, and so far, she's kept the promise to herself. On a clear night in October, she agreed to show me around where she and Melissa used to work, to get a view of the women who have taken their place.

"Does she look familiar?" I asked about the girl in front of us.

"Yeah. She knows me and I know her."

"Why not talk to her?"

"Because the girl's pimp is there, and I don't want her to get in trouble."

When Kritzia pointed to the pimp, I saw him for the first time, even though he was under ten feet away-skinny, white, and dressed plainly, eyeing us both suspiciously over a thin trace of a mustache.

We walked away a bit, then circled back around to Lace. "I'm trying to bring you closer but so we don't look so obvious," Kritzia said.

A new man, dressed in a suit, came walking down the block. The woman approached. "She's trying to talk to him," Kritzia said. "But he's probably not going to leave with her." She was a.s.sessing every aspect of the encounter with a professional eye. "I don't know, but it looks like he's staying at a nice hotel, and you can just tell she's a ho. But he might take her because she's pretty and she's white-you know, just because she's white and it looks more regular. But it's hard convincing men. You don't just walk up to a guy and he says, 'Yes, let's go.' 'Cause remember, you're talking hundreds of dollars."

As she finished speaking, we saw the man walk away.

"Yeah," Kritzia said, laughing. "I could always tell which guys would go with me and which guys wouldn't. Some girls talk to every man. I wouldn't, 'cause some guys would be a waste of time."

Everywhere she looked, there were memories. The McDonald's on Broadway, where they gathered in cold weather; the Batcave on Forty-seventh between Sixth and Seventh, where they hung out in the summer. The cross streets on this side of Seventh Avenue were dark this time of night, and Kritzia was muttering almost to herself, "Drug dealers. c.o.ke. Pot. Pimp wannabes. Stone-cold fake-a.s.s rappers."

Between the Batcave and Seventh Avenue, we saw a collection of people outside a deli on the north side of the street, and she stiffened. Then, just as though he were another bullet point on her list of what she'd left behind, Kritzia said, "That's my son's father right there. The one next to the one with the red jacket. We don't talk anymore."

Mel was in the center of the crowd, right in our path. We walked by, but not fast enough. As if to announce herself, Kritzia called out, "Excuse me!" and Mel whipped around and feinted a punch at her. She staggered back and was still reeling when, a half second later, he hit her for real this time. He made no attempt to hide what he was doing from anyone watching, but no one around him seemed to notice. Maybe they were too afraid and were looking the other way. Or maybe confrontations like that happened all the time.

I was startled, but I tried to stay close as Mel leaned toward her again, growling something only Kritzia could hear. She wouldn't let him touch her; she was weaving out, running for cover into the deli. Mel followed. The Asian guy behind the counter recognized Kritzia and said, "Oh, h.e.l.lo!" The shouting continued. After a few seconds, Kritzia darted out and rushed past me, down the block. I followed her.

She was trying to laugh it off. She lifted her iPhone and waved it at me; the screen was shattered. Then she locked eyes with mine. I saw a small bruise on her cheek and tears streaming down her face. She grunted. "You know, that's just the way of him talking to me, and getting to touch me, and feeling me up."

She wiped her nose and fixed her hair. We kept walking west, to Eighth and Ninth avenues, where she said the girls were cheaper, and where Kritzia had gotten her sad start. "You saw the way he was now? That's why n.o.body would ever f.u.c.k with me or Mel. 'Cause they're f.u.c.king scared of him. There's nothing to be scared of! Like, I got hit by him just now, and did you see me crying? Every other n.i.g.g.a would have been, like, running. 'Cause they're just, like, p.u.s.s.ies."

Kritzia was smiling. I wanted to see what it was like? Mission accomplished. She raised her hands in the air and let out a long, hearty laugh.

"This is the f.u.c.king life, yo!"

Kritzia had been out of circulation for a while. Back in 2009, shortly before Melissa disappeared, Kritzia had gotten pregnant with Mel's baby, a boy she would name Jemire, and moved to New Jersey. Her life had changed for a time. The pregnancy had compelled Kritzia to connect with her parents for the first time in years. A sort of armistice was declared: Kritzia didn't have to talk about where she'd been or what she'd done. Mel lived with her for a while. "Mel was paying all the rent, all the bills, taking care of everything. My parents weren't giving him nothing. They took our living room and made it my little brother's room."

Kritzia applied to school, and Mel found a straight job, in carpentry. "I thought everything was going to change." But when Jemire was born, Mel wasn't around. Then came a rent dispute with a landlord, which Mel sat out, and a move into a homeless shelter with Jemire. "Then one day I realized, this n.i.g.g.a just wants to be in the streets-he don't want to be a father. He don't want to work, he don't want to do what he's supposed to do. He just wants to be free. There are people that are like that."

Alone with Jemire, Kritzia broke down. She saw a psychiatrist for depression, and without her knowledge, the psychiatrist filled out an application on her behalf for SSI, the Social Security program that supports mentally or physically disabled people. It wasn't the money that Kritzia objected to; it was the possibility that being on SSI would flag her as an unfit mother. Sure enough, along came Children's Services. "They came after me and took me to court, to take my son." She appeared before a judge and made her case. She told him everything about her life. She got to keep Jemire. And when she needed money, she returned to Times Square to work.

One night in July 2011-a few weeks after the family vigil at Oak Beach in June-Kritzia ran into Blaze, standing outside of Lace.

"Is that Mariiii-ah? Hi, Mariiii-ah! How you doin'?"

They exchanged a few pleasantries. Kritzia showed him a photo of her baby. Then she asked, "Where's Melissa?"

"That b.i.t.c.h is dead," Blaze said.

"What?"

"Yeah, a trick killed her," Blaze said. "She was one of those girls they found in Long Island. All they found was her bones."

Kritzia had been so consumed by her own life in New Jersey that she didn't even know about the bodies on Ocean Parkway. She didn't believe it until she Googled Melissa's name. Then she saw the news and the video and the pictures, including one she'd seen before, of Melissa with red hair pulled back in a ponytail. That picture transported Kritzia to a night long ago, when they were riding into work from the Bronx. She even remembered what she was wearing that night, a tight white tank top with little spaghetti straps.

Kritzia started crying and couldn't stop. Then she started breaking things, and the people downstairs knocked on her door. When she saw how scared her son was, Kritzia finally calmed down. She went into the bathroom and shut the door.

She really had thought Blaze was lying.

The next day Kritzia jumped onto Facebook and joined all the memorial groups. She got on the phone with Lynn in Buffalo-they'd never spoken; not even Amanda knew Kritzia existed-and learned how Melissa's whole family had blamed Blaze for the life she'd been leading. Melissa's family had so many questions about her disappearance that Kritzia served at least as a kind of confirmation. "They were like a lovey-dovey couple," Kritzia said. "That's how Blaze treats his girls: hugs, kisses. I mean, pimps, they still beat you when you go to work, but then they act like they love you. That's why it makes you want to stay."

Kritzia didn't stop with Lynn. She was shattered by the idea of a serial killer going after girls just like her, and she needed to talk to someone about her lost friend and the fear of being preyed on herself. She friended Missy, Lorraine, and Sherre. Unlike Kim, Kritzia was an escort who spoke out with deep regret about the life she'd chosen. "I want it to be exposed, what goes on in Manhattan, what goes on in Times Square," she said. "There are so many other girls that are out there working right now. And they don't know. I want girls to get scared and stop working-which I know is not gonna happen, but some girls get scared. I got scared."

As she showed me around Times Square, Kritzia barely stopped talking long enough to catch her breath. She talked about what she and Melissa used to do, and why they did it, and why so many other people were still doing it-by some estimates as many as five thousand underage girls and boys in New York City are working as prost.i.tutes at any given time. She talked about being seventeen and homeless in Times Square, too angry to go home to her mother, rejected by cousins already packed into her grandmother's place. A bed at a city-run nonprofit social-service agency seemed out of the question. The city has about 250 beds available in all of New York for some four thousand homeless young people without families. When she met her first pimp, a guy everyone called Baba, Kritzia needed more than cash; she needed a reason to go on. "It's not just about the money. There are so many other things. You don't have family, you don't have friends, you don't have n.o.body. If you don't work, you don't eat, you don't have a place to live. When I was underage, n.o.body wanted to help me-because I was underage! n.o.body wanted to give me a job, no one wanted to give me an apartment."

Kritzia said that escort work gave her something to do, someone to be, though selling her body meant living in a shadow world that everyone ignored. "And then you've got pimps who follow you and beat you up. And then you go in front of the judge, and they don't care, they throw you in jail." She believed that Melissa's online career was her way of escaping that cycle. "People think, Oh, the money, the money, but do you know how hard it is to get a guy to date you? I'm not just standing on the corner, waiting. You have to go to them, walk to them, talk to them, convince them. Then you have to agree on a price, convince them, and a whole lot of f.u.c.king bulls.h.i.+t."

She was crying now. "I was thinking about her all day today. That's why she didn't walk the streets-because it was so much work. It was too much walking. Like, you have to walk all over Manhattan, like, all night on these heels, and you don't know who you're gonna meet, you don't know if you're gonna make money. You just walk all night in the cold, in the heat. And that's what Melissa didn't like and why she started advertising on the Internet."

Online, Kritzia became an honorary family member, representing Melissa's memory in the memorial Facebook pages, posting constantly. She was mostly steering clear of contact with Mel, and she had no use for Blaze anymore.

But someone who knew Blaze, near the Batcave on Forty-seventh Street, was able to relay a message to him, and a few weeks after my visit there, Blaze and I spoke on the phone. Straight away, he denied being a pimp. He said he was a musician and a rap producer. Kritzia had predicted this: "Blaze wanted to be everything, but he really was nothing." Blaze, in turn, had some unfriendly things to say about Kritzia: "She probably gets a check from the state for being slow."

But he stayed on the phone. He seemed eager to get a message to Melissa's family in Buffalo. He surprised me by saying that he used to call and talk with Lynn all the time when he and Melissa were together. Though he seemed to want to meet in person and agreed to have lunch at a Caribbean place in Was.h.i.+ngton Heights, not too far from where he lived, he never showed up.

"I've got a lot of stress," he said later, on the phone. He had three kids, and for the first time in his life, he said, he was being hit up for child support. He agreed to stay in touch with me. A few months later, after a flurry of texts, he was on the phone again. In a more tender moment, Blaze told me what he loved most about Melissa: "The way that she would go hard for me. The love that she had for me. The way she was there for me, no matter what people said. Like, when we used to argue or break up, she would call me back on the phone and rush back to the house or whatever and try to fix it."

He even said his mother liked her. "My moms loved her. My moms, you know? She would come over and help the best way she can, always. Always."

He revealed a little more about himself. He said his kids were nine, twelve, and thirteen. He'd gotten out of jail recently, after serving a brief stretch for credit-card fraud. "That was bulls.h.i.+t," he said. In one of our last conversations, I brought up the attack on Melissa in the street, the one Kritzia said he ordered. That was when Blaze exploded. "I took care of her the whole time she was out here! Any time somebody is with somebody in a relations.h.i.+p, you can't tell me that people don't have fusses and fights and arguments. So if I'm guilty of fussing and fighting with my girlfriend, yeah, I'm guilty for that. But hurting her and harming her? No, no. Not at all. I've been through some stuff because of her, stuff a lot of homies could've got killed for, and I still took her back, you know what I mean?"

He s.h.i.+fted the focus away from himself, back to Melissa's family. This time he was less tender. "She sent Lynn the money to pay her bills, for her diner and all that. Did you know that? Did you? So come on. Like, everybody's putting me out to be the bad guy or whatever. But your daughter was the one who was in the streets doing stuff, not me. Not me."

Sometimes-"Well, okay, a lot of the time"-Sara Karnes thought about what would have happened if she'd stayed in the Super 8 with Maureen on Monday morning. Would Maureen still be alive? She knew the answer. "I wouldn't have let her go. We would've just ended up chilling in the room till Wednesday."

Sara didn't stop working after Maureen disappeared. She went back to New York, to the Super 8, a few times with Matt, and she and Matt hooked up. Sara tried doing calls in Connecticut, but she learned quickly how much better the johns treated her in New York-most of them, anyway. There, she felt treated like a princess. Back home, she'd say she was treated like "a f.u.c.kin' street-corner b.i.t.c.h, only more expensive."

She posted as Lacey on Craigslist for eastern Connecticut. One guy she met at the Two Trees Inn at Foxwoods was completely naked when she walked into the room. "Hi, I'm Lacey," she said. The guy said, "I don't give a f.u.c.k. The money's on the counter, put it in your pocket, and suck my d.i.c.k." She surveyed the scene and walked out. He was naked, she was dressed; let him try to chase her.

She kept on working steadily until 2009-two years after Maureen's disappearance-when she got picked up for the first time by the police. She had a cop friend, a Norwich detective who had worked on Maureen's disappearance early on, who hadn't been very helpful to Missy but gave Sara good counsel. Every time Sara would call him to check in about Maureen's case, he'd offer tips on where or when not to work. Unfortunately, he was telling her only about what he knew, in Norwich. When Sara arrived for an outcall at the Radisson in New London, she got caught. Normally, the bond would have been $2,500, which would have meant paying $250 to get out. But the cop who arrested her saw that she didn't have a pimp and wasn't part of some bigger drug or s.e.x ring, so he took pity on her and released her on a promise to appear in court at a later date.

Life might have gone on fine for Sara if she hadn't been busted again for drug dealing. It was March 17, 2010. Sara claimed she was set up by the wife of a cousin who turned out to be a confidential informant. She was charged with dealing and prost.i.tution and failure to appear in court and was sent to jail. She got out on June 11, her twenty-eighth birthday. She went into a drug program, failed it, and went back to doing calls, despite being pregnant. When she missed a court date, she earned a "failure to appear" bench warrant. When she got arrested for rolling a blunt behind the Groton Stop & Shop, that put her away for real.

The second time in jail seemed to snap Sara out of it. She decided she just couldn't do the work anymore. When she found out about Maureen, she added that to her list of reasons. "There's nothing that can convince me," she said. "I'm broke as s.h.i.+t right now, and if this was two or three years ago, you're d.a.m.n right I'd be doing it right now. Because I don't want to be broke. But I'd rather be broke and with my daughter than what happened to Maureen."

On the day in October when we met for lunch in Stamford, where she was living in a nonprofit shelter for families, Sara was late. She had thought her daughter, a fourteen-month-old named Bella, was sick and had taken her to the hospital, but it was just a cold. Then she saw her probation officer; she had to see him monthly for another eight months, until June, when her probation for the felony was scheduled to end: "my faaabulous felony," as she put it. She had to mention it to every potential employer. As a result, Sara hadn't been able to get a legitimate job.

Over lunch, Sara talked about the irony of getting a free four-hundred-dollar replacement phone-the latest Droid-after getting robbed, but not being able to find a job to get out of a shelter. Then she looked down at Bella, who was playing with the phone. Sara said her daughter was the best reason she'd stopped escorting.

The night before, Missy had sent Sara a Web link to a German doc.u.mentary that seemed to show video of a skeleton being discovered along Ocean Parkway. Missy was certain the skeleton was Maureen's, because the shoulders were so broad. Sara flipped out when she saw the video. She showed it to two other women at the shelter. Then she went on Facebook with her new Droid and published a screed about it. If I would, I'd go Dexter-style on him, she wrote. As we talked, Sara said she'd rather be Stieg Larsson's avenging Goth girl, Lisbeth Salander. Whenever she felt this way, Sara posted on Maureen's Facebook page: I'm soooo sorry Maureen that i didn't stay. I'm so sorry that there's a f.u.c.kin' wacko out there that thinks he can play G.o.d when he's really the devil . . . I keep praying that all of this will end, that this motherf.u.c.ker will pay dearly for what he did to you all. I personally don't think that our justice system has a severe enough punishment for this creep.

Sara had known Maureen for only six months before she disappeared. Something about the emotion she brought to the loss seemed misplaced, overwrought, as if the drama helped elevate her life a little. But those feelings were real to her. Whenever she was feeling low, Sara tried not to think about how Maureen died but, rather, about how she lived. She would will herself to recall her favorite memory: that Sunday night in July, their hair done up, their makeup perfect, all eyes on them in Times Square. Sara said she believed that Maureen was put in her life to teach her to be more independent-" 'Cause my mom sure didn't." Sometimes she thought that was as good as life would ever get for her.

"I made that Lacey picture my Facebook picture," she said. " 'Cause it's pretty. It's my favorite picture of myself."

On each of Greg Waterman's arms are two enormous tattoos spelling out one phrase: CAUGHT UP IN / THE STRUGGLE. Megan's brother had been working construction for the same guy for seven years until the 2008 market crash forced his boss to sell half of his properties. Since then, Greg has had trouble finding work. His search was complicated by the fact that he'd lost his driver's license and had a theft arrest on his record. "That really screws things up for me," he said over dinner at the Olive Garden at the Maine Mall. "It was five years ago, it was a while ago. I just can't deal with not having a job."

Greg had four kids. Nicci Hayc.o.c.k was the mother of the youngest. "She's got two kids with another person. I look at them as my own kids, I raised those kids like my own for three and a half years." He and Nicci were together a long time, but at dinner, they said they were on a break for the time being. "It's not permanent," Greg said. "It's just the time is not right." He suggested that their separation had something to do with his sister's disappearance. "My anger got a lot worse," he said as Nicci stared down at her food.

Like the rest of Megan's family, Greg spent the better part of a year bristling at Lorraine, especially after her trips to New York to publicize the case. When Greg found out about the little heart-and-angel trinket she had bought the other mothers and sisters in New York, he castigated her for buying gifts for four strangers when she hadn't bought her own grandchildren a thing in years. The vigil in June compounded the problem. He and Nicci went down with Lorraine, but "she was more concerned with impressing the other family members there." He almost exploded at her when she encouraged him to drive faster. "I said, 'I'm not rus.h.i.+ng for you, and I'm not rus.h.i.+ng for them. I didn't come down there to show my face, I came down there to see where they found my sister.' I was so sick of her, you know? She's so worried about getting down there to get her face on the news."

Greg did explode when he got home and saw Lorraine's post on Facebook that the women at that vigil were her "new family." Even months later, he was practically shouting about it at the table, speaking as if Lorraine were right there in the restaurant with us. "You're out here again trying to get a pity party for you? I've been back in Maine for a month and a half, and you haven't called once to see how my daughter is! Everyone in your biological family knows how you are and your true colors and all these other people don't." For Lorraine to call Megan her daughter, he said, was a joke. "You never had her. You were never a mother to her. Your mother raised her."

Lorraine, meanwhile, was feeling as wronged as Greg, locked out of Lili's life by her mother, Muriel, and Lorraine's oldest sister, Liz. "When Megan was alive, all of Liliana's birthdays were at my house," she told me a few weeks later. "When Liliana turned four, Megan wasn't here, and we still had her party at my house. Since Liz got guardians.h.i.+p, she had planned Liliana's fifth birthday party and never invited me. So I missed my granddaughter's fifth birthday party because of my sister. Her school pictures, everybody in the family has a picture of her but me. That's a tough situation."

What was more upsetting to Lorraine was that, at least according to her, Liz had next to nothing to do with Megan when she was alive. "Liz could not stand Megan!" She said that Liz asked Megan to sign over custody of Lili while Megan was alive, thinking maybe she just wouldn't want the headache of having a child. (Megan declined.) "And the minute Megan went missing, Liz and everybody in my family acted like they'd been involved in Megan's whole life."

Now it was Lorraine who had seemed to fall away again. Muriel and Liz were accusing her of being completely inaccessible, never returning calls, never making time for Lili, and yet still complaining about being the black sheep. Once, when Lili had fractured her ankle, Muriel and Greg each tried to call Lorraine, and when she didn't answer, they left messages. She didn't call back. Then Lorraine noticed the news on one of Liz's Facebook posts, and she posted: It's a shame I have to hear about my granddaughter breaking her ankle on Facebook. "She might be angry," Liz said, "but she really doesn't feel anything is her fault."

"You know what breaks my heart?" Muriel said. "Lorraine turning her back on this baby. Any time Lorraine even calls to see how she is, it's because I posted something nasty about her on Facebook."

All these years later, Muriel still didn't believe that Lorraine could be a good parent. Ella, Lorraine and Liz's sister, agreed. "I tried to defend Lorraine when it comes to Lili," she said, "but it's not my mother saying no. It's Lorraine just not doing it on her own."

Greg sided with his aunt and grandmother. He hadn't always seen eye to eye with Liz-he'd like to share custody of Lili; Liz and Muriel are concerned that he isn't stable enough-but Lorraine incensed him. "She acts like she wants to get to know her granddaughter, but behind closed doors, she could give two s.h.i.+ts about it," Greg said. "She can't be bothered. She does more for her boyfriend's kid now than she does for her kids or grandkids."

A lawyer would cost Lorraine about two thousand dollars to fight for custody. That was money she didn't have, and she couldn't pull it together working at Domino's. Once she earned her medical-a.s.sistant degree, maybe she would have a chance. For now, all she could do was bide her time. "When Liliana gets older," she said, "she will learn the truth, just like Greg and Megan did when they got old enough. Liliana is going to know the same thing and realize or know that it had nothing to do with me."

One late-summer day, Dave Schaller was walking near his new home in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, when he heard the honk of a car horn. Dave looked over and his mind flooded. He remembered the car right away, an Ultima, and the guy behind the wheel, one of Amber's old johns. As he recalled, this john lived somewhere in Na.s.sau County. Dave didn't know what he was doing in Brooklyn, or why he wanted to talk, but decided he didn't want to know. Dave dashed down the stairs of the G train to avoid him.

Dave knew he'd been running a risk by appearing on 48 Hours in July. The police had warned Dave not to be too out in front about his ties to Amber or the case. "The cops were like, 'Listen, it could've been somebody you threw out of the house. You don't know if you once kicked this guy's a.s.s.' " Now, Dave thought they had a point. "If the killer was so adamant about picking her up near my house, he's probably somebody I saw," he said. "So I worry about it sometimes. What if I'm a loose end?"

All fall, as Dave continued hitting the methadone and looking for work, he dreamed of Amber, of how he had failed to save her. "Every single f.u.c.king time she had somebody come or she went somewhere, I was with her," he said. "Every time except the time she left and she got killed." By day, he felt stigmatized. "Everybody thinks I was a G.o.dd.a.m.n pimp. Because why would I have two wh.o.r.es in my house if I wasn't f.u.c.king pimping them?" His only respite was twelve-step meetings. He despised them, but they kept him together. "I'm not going to lose my sobriety," he said. "I hate sitting there, but it is what it is."

One thing he'd managed to get over was his attachment to Kim, though now and then, he'd allow himself to vent. "I'm glad she's out of my life, that much I can say," he said. "Let me tell you, man. That girl, it's sad to say, but she's going to wind up dead. She's going to wind up dead."

I suggested that Kim might be going through a version of what he was going through, that she felt guilty, too.

"I hope she does," Dave said. "I really do hope she feels guilty. Because the way she treated her sister was f.u.c.ked up."

Kim's Backpage photo showed her tan and trim and toned. Shot from behind, she was topless and bending forward, away from the camera, offering a full view of her lean bottom in a tight set of black panties, riding up. In person, though, she looked tired, worn out. The skin on her face hung a little loose. As she talked over lunch on a September afternoon in Manhattan, Kim demonstrated a lot of addict behavior-she was hyper-verbal, very friendly, constantly gauging my reactions, never overtly asking for anything. Still, all through the long lunch, she was in a great mood. She ordered a gla.s.s of red wine, and as she talked, she did her best to describe her current life as free of conflict.