Lost Girls Part 5

She also told Lorraine that she and Vybe had plans for the money. They were going to get a place together. They were going to get married. Lorraine even took Megan around town to look at apartments a few times. But there were some obstacles. Megan had a criminal record, and Vybe still faced those pending drug and weapons charges in Brooklyn. They needed a place that didn't require a background check. That required a good amount of cash.

The two of them often stayed at a Howard Johnson that was a short walk from where Greg and Nicci lived in Westbrook. Megan brought Lili back and forth on days when Vybe was busy. Vybe didn't like leaving the hotel when he could help it, because the police were starting to follow him, so usually, Greg or Nicci picked up Megan and Lili from the hotel and brought them down the road. They went to the playground together with their kids, or to movies or shows, or back to Happy Wheels, for old times' sake. At the hotel, Greg got to see Vybe's business up close. He saw which guys came and got what. He saw some c.o.ke fiends trade their possessions when they were low on cash; DVD players and cameras were stacked up in the hotel room. Once, Vybe traded a $2,500 laptop for $100 worth of c.o.ke. "He didn't trade s.h.i.+t to get s.h.i.+t and trade it again," Greg said. "If he had no use for it, he didn't want it."

Greg and Nicci's understanding was that Megan's involvement in that side of Vybe's business was limited to hiding portions of his supply at Muriel's place in Scarborough. A trailer has any number of compartments and hiding places; Muriel and Doug never knew a thing about it. In fact, Megan did more than that. She helped Vybe deal, and she was also his customer. The irony was that Vybe was as angry as anyone that Megan was using. "I know there were times when there was a little bit missing and he wasn't happy," Allie said. "He wasn't happy she was using at all."

That winter, an old friend of Megan's was at her place on Boyd Street with her daughter, waiting for her boyfriend to come back from picking up some heroin. She heard a scream. She ran outside. Vybe was there, beating up a woman. Megan's friend watched as he grabbed the woman by the hair and smashed her face against the side of the house.

Megan's friend screamed. When Vybe was finished, she approached the woman and saw her face. "Megan?"

Megan was crying but then seemed shocked to see her friend.

"She just ripped me off," the boyfriend said.

"I bet she smoked it all herself," said Vybe.

Megan's friend called an ambulance and went with her to the hospital. Megan wouldn't talk about what had happened. When her friend tried to ask any questions, Megan snapped, "I know what I'm doing! You're not my mother!" She never saw Megan again.

At Christmas, Vybe got presents for Megan and Lili. They were starting to seem more like a family. But in April 2010, Nicci got a call from Megan. She'd messed up again. She was selling some of Vybe's c.o.ke to a neighbor in the trailer park-a guy named Wayne who was older than she was, someone who had watched her grow up-and they'd done the whole stash. Megan needed a cover story. She wanted to tell Vybe that she and Nicci had gone out drinking the night before. She needed Nicci to back her up. Nicci agreed.

Later that day, Megan called Nicci again. She sounded upset but resigned. "He didn't punch me, he didn't choke me." But he had hit her. He'd clotheslined her, she said, not clenching his fist.

"Do you have any bruises?" Nicci asked. "Are you bleeding?"

"No."

When Greg found out, he looked at Megan closely. There was no black eye, no bruises. She seemed contrite: I know I messed up. I pretty much deserved what I got. He thought about it. He understood. He thought maybe Megan would smarten up a little.

Vybe didn't see her for a time. He went to stay with an old girlfriend, Ashley Carroll, who heard his side of phone calls with Megan. He'd yell, and she would talk back, and he would threaten her: "I'm gonna set your stuff on fire!" Then Ashley would hear weeping from the other side of the line, and Vybe would soothe her. "I love you. I miss you. I'm sorry. I love you. We'll have a baby. We'll have a home. Everything's gonna be fine." Ashley would keep listening as he purred into the phone: "I want you to have my baby. I love you, no one else."

Vybe's hotel room had been the center of too much action-dealing, prost.i.tution, maybe stolen goods-for the police not to take notice. In the middle of May, while Megan and Vybe were still apart, the police staged a raid. They arrested him and three others and found drugs and weapons in the room. Megan kept a vigil at her friend Shareena's house, crying and worrying. It happened that Vybe and the other three had the resources to make bail, set at fifty thousand each. The whole matter was thrown out because the police didn't have a warrant.

On the day of Vybe's release, Megan walked two miles from the top of c.u.mberland Avenue through the center of Portland to meet him at the jail. They embraced. On May 31, she posted an ad in Portland (hey boys its lexy im back in town). The next day, she and Vybe started packing for another trip to Long Island. Megan told practically everyone that it was going to be one of her last trips. All she needed was a little bit of money to get Liliana into day care, and a little more to get an apartment for her and Vybe.

Megan couldn't have been more thrilled that Vybe said he wanted a baby. Looking at Nicci's four children, she had always said she wanted only one child, that Lili was enough. Yet when Vybe said he wanted a boy, Megan decided that was what she wanted, too.

Hauppauge. June 5, 2010.

On a Friday afternoon, Megan took a bus from Portland to Long Island. Vybe had left a few days earlier on his own to see his family in Brooklyn. Megan checked in alone at a Holiday Inn Express in Hauppauge, on a bare stretch of the Long Island Expressway.

She had company soon after. At eight P.M., the security camera recorded Vybe and Megan leaving the hotel together. But at eight-thirty, Megan came back alone. In her room, she made some calls. She briefly talked with Lorraine at around ten. She called Nicci at about eleven, but Nicci was too tired to talk; she told Megan she'd call the next day. Just before midnight, Megan called Muriel and said that Vybe was out with some friends and she was tired and going to bed. She asked if Lili was up. Muriel scoffed. "Um, it's midnight," she said. "Are you kidding?" Megan told Muriel she would call in the morning.

Sometime after midnight, Lexi posted an ad on Craigslist: Jump Into A World Like No Other-Please no blocked calls or text messages Vybe spoke with Megan on the phone at around 1:20 A.M. Ten minutes later, at 1:30 A.M., the security camera in the lobby of the Holiday Inn Express recorded Megan walking out through the automatic sliding door. The hotel is isolated, on a narrow service road to the highway. One witness later said Megan seemed to be walking down the service road toward a nearby convenience store-a good meeting place, perhaps, for a john who didn't want to be seen.

Vybe called Shareena the next morning. "I've been to the hotel, she's not there, her phone's not there, nothing's there."

Shareena rea.s.sured him. "She's a wild thing," she said. "She may have just gone and got something to eat and didn't tell you." But Megan's phone was going to voicemail, and they both knew Megan never turned off her phone.

Vybe was concerned enough to call Megan's grandmother. He had a story ready: He said he and some buddies had gone out drinking, and Megan had called his phone and said she was getting something to eat and would call when she got back. When Megan never called, Vybe said, he figured she'd crashed. At six in the morning, he came by her room. The concierge wouldn't let him in but did open the door to see if Megan was sleeping. She wasn't there.

Vybe did call the police to say that Megan had been wearing silver hoop earrings, a silver garnet ring, and a silver necklace. What he wouldn't do, due to his criminal record, was risk seeing them in person. For the next week, he wouldn't tell anyone exactly where he was. Meanwhile, everyone Megan knew in Portland was talking about him: what he really knew, whether he was telling the truth. The police caught up with him as soon as he returned to Portland. A girl they all knew named Krystal Alexander-not a particularly good friend of Megan's-accused Vybe of slas.h.i.+ng her tires and threatening her. She had been telling people that even her boyfriend, a friend of Vybe's named Piff, was suspicious of him.

Vybe was arrested and charged with criminal menacing with a dangerous weapon. Before he could leave on bail, the police issued a warrant for him on July 1 for failing to appear in court on an old charge of driving without a license. He got out again. The third time was the charm: On Tuesday, August 10, Vybe was arrested in a raid of his hotel room. The police were more careful than they'd been in the May raid. They had a warrant. They seized thirteen grams of crack with a reported street value of thirteen hundred dollars. There was no bail set this time. Vybe had become everyone's prime suspect. In the eyes of Megan's family, he was more than a dealer and a pimp. He was a human trafficker. Now that he was in jail, he wasn't saying anything to anyone.

Megan's disappearance didn't do much to resolve the family feuds. Muriel and Lorraine cooperated a little at first-on a vigil at Congress Square in Portland and a spaghetti dinner at the First Congregational Church on Congress Street. Then Lorraine learned that Muriel was angling to take custody of Lili. It was Megan and Greg all over again: Muriel had decided that Lorraine wasn't maternal enough to handle it. Instead, she wanted her oldest daughter, Liz Meserve, to share custody. Liz was happy to oblige.

Even as she was losing her granddaughter, Lorraine was being sought by the local media as the grieving mother. As long as Megan was missing, her case held attraction for cable news. In August, CNN's Jane Velez-Mitch.e.l.l show called to put Lorraine on the air ("A twenty-two-year-old mother who may have advertised herself as an escort on Craigslist has vanished. Could Megan Waterman's disappearance be tied to her alleged online postings?"). Even as she was genuinely mourning, Lorraine was offered a chance to be something she never was in real life: a devoted mother who had a close relations.h.i.+p with her loving daughter. Muriel, watching from Crystal Springs, could hardly believe her eyes.

CAROLINA.

Dave had a weakness for girls like Kim: the short hair, the gla.s.ses, the smile. When he first saw her behind the counter at the pizzeria in Northport, Long Island, part of him fell in love. When she spoke, he heard her Southern accent and saw his opening. "Oh, where are you from? Between your haircut, your gla.s.ses, and your accent, you're the perfect woman."

Kim laughed and gave him her phone number. "Why don't you call me?" she said.

Dave didn't, and he was too shy to come back. But a few days later, he was driving down Montauk Highway in his Acura and noticed her walking along the sidewalk. Dave summoned his nerve, flew around in a U-turn, and pulled over. "Hey, pizza girl!" He couldn't remember her name.

Kim peered through the window at Dave. "Hey!" She remembered him.

Dave smiled. "Want a ride?"

Pretty much everything Dave Schaller did, he picked up on the fly. He graduated from high school in East Meadow, Long Island, and went for a short time to Na.s.sau Community College-where he was better at drinking than anything else-but he liked to cook, and in his twenties, he pretty much taught himself to be a chef. Next, he got work on fis.h.i.+ng charters and earned his captain's license. Then Dave got into mixed martial arts and ultimate fighting. He had the build for it-six feet tall and 250 pounds, with a shock of red hair and tattoos up and down each arm. He made some money in underground fights in Manhattan bas.e.m.e.nts and parking garages-$500 for a loss and as much as $4,000 for a win. He did it six times and stopped only after he broke his hands in his single loss.

He was thirty-two when he met Kim. It was the fall of 2009, and Dave had recently become a partner in a buddy's used-car dealers.h.i.+p in the town of Babylon, Long Island. From his job there, he had as many as four cars at a time in his driveway-an Acura TL, a Nissan Sentra, a Ford Durango, and a black GMC Denali. He was living well, even as he was living with chronic pain, a steady aching in his legs that resulted from a nerve disorder called reflex sympathetic dystrophy syndrome, or RSD. Dave had been prescribed opiates, such as OxyContin, that he didn't like to use if he could help it. The pills that he didn't take, he'd sell every month, making thousands of dollars from a dealer who bought everything in one bundle, quick and easy. The money helped him invest in the dealers.h.i.+p and pay the rent on a little cottage on America Avenue in West Babylon. The house was deeper than it looked from the street, with lots of storage s.p.a.ce. The surrounding neighborhood was Italian, middle cla.s.s, nice. Dave planted sea gra.s.s and perennials on the lawn. His last relations.h.i.+p had shattered him, but Dave was a born romantic, always harboring a crush or looking for someone new to protect, to take care of.

Those first few months, Kim was sweet as a peach-caring and comforting, a natural listener and an even more natural talker. In time, Dave would share all his pains and heartaches, and she'd sit and take it all in, putting her head on his shoulder, saying, "Don't worry about it." They would spend hours together, shopping at the Roosevelt Field mall, having lunch at the Post Office Cafe in Babylon, walking the boardwalk at Jones Beach, going to the movies, Dave tagging along to the nail salon for a few laughs. Kim persuaded Dave to get his nails and toes done along with her, and even an eyebrow wax, and he eventually agreed, sitting there, all 250 pounds of him, next to all these fifty-year-old Long Island yentas, with all these Chinese ladies tending to him. The waxing was traumatic; he howled hilariously. He went back with Kim every two weeks.

Kim supplied Dave with a considerably sanitized version of her life story: the childhood in Wilmington and the kids-six of them now, three in North Carolina and three here on Long Island-but none of the drugs and none of the prost.i.tution. She told him that she was living two towns away with her boyfriend, Mike Donato, and their kids. Dave learned later that Mike's parents were doing most, if not all, of the child care; Mike and Kim had even signed over custody. He didn't meet Mike right away; Kim said he was in jail for pa.s.sing bad checks. So the coast was clear for them to get together.

Kim made a big show of having fun in bed with Dave. If, in hindsight, something about her seemed a little too rote, with no sense of discovery or surprise, it didn't matter to him. He was ready to do anything for her and to show her off to everyone. He brought Kim to a friend's wedding, shopping for the dress with her beforehand. He sent presents to her kids in North Carolina-clothes, gift certificates, roller skates. He bought Kim a cell phone and signed her on to his friends-and-family plan. He would talk to Kim's oldest daughter, Marissa, in North Carolina when Kim wouldn't return her calls. "I wish she'd marry you so she'd have a nice guy and be normal," Marissa would say.

But the one he got to know best on the phone was Kim's little sister. Amber was a drunk dialer. Calling constantly from Florida, she referred to Dave as her brother-in-law. "I want to meet you," she'd say. Kim seemed unhappy about the idea of Amber coming up to Long Island. She said her sister was persona non grata around her boyfriend's parents, that if they ever saw Amber in town, they would suspect Kim was up to no good.

Thanks to Dave, Kim didn't have a choice. He would listen as Amber rambled, picking up on the desperation in her voice. He heard her allude to drug deals gone bad, mounting debts, and dangerous men, and he wasn't good at doing nothing when something needed doing. No matter how antsy Kim was about the idea, he made it his business to get Amber up to Long Island and into rehab. He sent Amber money for a plane ticket. She cashed it in and got high. He sent another one, and in February 2010, Amber arrived at MacArthur Airport in Islip. Dave brought her home.

When Kim saw her, she started tearing up. She hadn't seen her sister in nearly three years. Amber weighed something like eighty pounds. Her arms had track marks everywhere. She smelled-her hygiene was horrible-and she was missing a lot of teeth. Dave could see past it all. He saw a mini-Kim standing there-every bit as beautiful, only more vulnerable, more in need, he thought, of his care.

Those first few weeks, while he hustled to find her a bed in a rehab, Dave didn't know whether she would sneak away or try to steal some of his things. Dave had some Oxys and Suboxones that helped take the sting out of her withdrawal. He had one bed, a king, and he wasn't going to make her sleep on the couch, so they all shared it. A few weeks later, after chasing down all of Amber's doc.u.ments, Dave found Amber a spot in a detox at Na.s.sau University Medical Center in East Meadow, then a bed in a thirty-six-day rehab at St. Charles Hospital in Port Jefferson.

Dave did all this out of love for Kim. He knew she was still with Mike, and when Mike got out of jail, he understood why she didn't come around quite as often. She'd never promised to run off with him, and he insisted that was fine with him, too. What he was less fine with was the way Kim avoided going to see her sister. Granted, she was juggling a lot: her boyfriend and her kids, her boyfriend's parents presumably looking over her shoulder. And while Dave didn't know the extent of it at the time, she had her own crack habit to manage. But he saw Amber every Sat.u.r.day and Sunday in rehab, and Kim never visited once. Even as he made nice to Kim on the phone, Dave was fuming, screaming at her, but only to himself: What, did she think this was like having a cat?

Every new person Amber had met after her epiphany with Crystal back in Wilmington seemed like another chance to find the family she craved. Every time that chance slipped away, she was lost all over again. She had found her faith, then lost it, then found it and lost it again.

According to Amber's father, Al, pastor Charles West of the Open Door Church in the town of Leland, outside Wilmington, had taken her in for a short while. The pastor and his daughter treated Amber like one of their own. Amber later said her time with them was the only time when the withdrawal completely left her, when she was completely free. She called them "my family."

She was all right, Al said, as long as the pastor was alive. When he died suddenly, the church dissipated. Amber relapsed, then cleaned up long enough to be married briefly, to a man ten years her senior named Michael Wilhelm, only to divorce after another relapse. "She was a good girl, but she just had bad habits," Al said.

In 2005, Amber's mom, Margie, died after the ulcer that had laid her low years earlier had repeatedly ruptured. That was when Amber moved to Florida with Kim and Mike Donato, looking for a fresh start. Amber had soon drifted away from Kim and joined a Christian congregation in Dunedin, a town on the little peninsula west of Tampa on the gulf. Amber had worked her way into the church community with the same zeal she'd thrown into fitting in at Coed Confidential. She sang in the choir. She attended women's retreats. She found a job serving food at a diner near the church and the new house where she had moved close by. She joined Celebrate Recovery, a church-affiliated group that helped people deal openly with addiction. When she talked about the rape, one woman said, "Amber, I kind of knew. I was just waiting for you to tell me."

She married again in 2007, to a man named Don Costello. Amber told a friend that the marriage was like a promise from G.o.d-one of the rare promises that G.o.d actually kept. They had lived in Don's apartment, a condo in a desirable building, across the street from a top-rated public school. They had joined his church, and Amber worked in the nursery there. She and Don had even tried to start a family of their own and had endured some heartbreaking setbacks-a miscarriage and adoption plans that fell through. A year or so into the marriage, a family in the church had had a child they couldn't take care of, a baby named Gabriel. Child Protective Services got involved. While the church helped the couple sort out their problems, Amber and Don had stepped in and taken care of the boy, which made Amber deliriously happy. She had taken Gabriel to Wilmington and introduced him to her father, whom she encouraged to become more religious, too. "She just told me I needed to get closer to G.o.d," Al said. " 'Just believe-you got to believe.' " While she was there, she had taught the boy to call Al "Granddaddy."

The euphoria didn't last. Everything good in Amber's life couldn't paper over the wound that wouldn't heal. There was the person she longed to be and the person she was. Time and again, she'd come close to becoming that new person only to snap back.

Her marriage to Don ended in March 2009, fifteen months after it began. He didn't like talking about it; when he did, he suggested that he had been deceived. "She was not truthful throughout our marriage," Don said. He saw her one last time before Christmas, when she came by to pick up some holiday decorations. That same month, she was arrested at a Publix supermarket for trying to shoplift toothpaste. Amber had told the cop she worked at the Clearwater Library. She'd been ordered to appear in court in February, but by then she was long gone. She had moved to Long Island to clean herself up for good. Kim was waiting there with a new friend who promised to help Amber change her life for real.

When Amber came out of rehab, Dave learned that she'd made another new friend. Bjrn Brodsky-Bear to his friends-showed up at St. Charles a week after Amber. He was about as tall as Dave but rail-thin. Two of him would be as wide as Dave. Amber cracked Bear up, this itty-bitty thing, barely five feet tall, with eyes that always seemed on fire. When Bear got out a week after she did, Amber asked Dave to pick him up. Bear came home with them, and the three of them lived together in the house in West Babylon. That was when things started to change.

Like Dave, Bear spoke in a gruff Long Island accent, but he was more confident and smooth-a natural salesman, adept at making his life seem mythic and romantic and pure and righteous. Bjrn means bear in Swedish. He'd laugh about being called Bear. "Because no one could p.r.o.nounce Bjrn, for some reason? There's two dots above the O, ya r.e.t.a.r.d!" He told Amber and Dave that he'd grown up in Great Neck, part of a middle-cla.s.s family in a fairly well-off section of Long Island's North Sh.o.r.e. His father was a construction foreman, working cla.s.s and Jewish, and his mother was a Tennessee Baptist. Bear embraced his Southern background-poor white-trash moons.h.i.+ners. While his Great Neck friends all got brand-new Mercedes drop-tops, Bear's first car was a 1979 Buick Skylark, $340 out of a junkyard in Tennessee.

Dave liked Bear. Having him around the house, he thought, was better than letting Amber go off somewhere on her own, unsupervised. For a while, Dave could make a pretty good case to himself that he was taking in a bunch of screwups and fixing them all. As they grew closer, Dave learned that in the year before, Bear had successfully torpedoed his entire life, spending eight months in jail for breaking and entering-roped in by an ex-friend, he insisted-and that his longtime girlfriend had a baby boy while he was away. The girlfriend was not into drugs. When Bear got out of jail, he saw the baby and then went right back to using. At the St. Charles rehab, Bear was hoping to straighten out so he could be part of his son's life. Then he met Amber.

Both Dave and Bear got to know Amber better, too. They saw how determined she was to be liked and how much she craved intimacy. Amber always needed to be held by Bear, to cuddle, to have some sort of physical contact. She was embarra.s.sed by her teeth-it seemed to Dave that more than half were gone-but as brash and s.e.xually open as she'd always been. When she coyly joked about what she called her "million-dollar p.u.s.s.y," Dave and Bear saw through the posturing. They saw how nearly everything about Amber could be traced back to a deep, unbridled need to be loved, including how territorial she became. She hated hearing that Bear had a baby son with another woman, and she hated it more when he would cut away for the day to see them. She didn't talk much about her spiritual life, but she did dwell on her failed marriages, weeping about her failed quest for a child of her own.

If all Amber had ever wanted was a family, that was what they became on America Avenue. Kim and Dave were the mom and dad, and Amber and Bear were the kids. Whenever Kim could pull away from her boyfriend, Mom and Dad would head off to lunch at the Post Office pub, where Dave would ogle the waitresses until Kim sneered at him; Amber and Bear would do their own thing at home. The neighborhood around Dave's cottage reminded Bear a little of Tennessee: a little laid-back, a little country. When Bear noticed that Dave headed out every day to Na.s.sau University Hospital, for methadone to help with his chronic pain, then asked him about it, Dave was p.i.s.sed off at first. But when Bear promised not to tell anyone, the secret drew them closer.

When Kim couldn't come by Dave's place, they formed a trio. Amber was Dave's little buddy, his comrade-in-arms, and Bear made for a happy third member of the crew. When Kim visited less and less often, Dave felt like a divorced stay-at-home dad. He felt played by Kim. For the first time, he thought she might only have let him sleep with her so she could get what she needed: money, a phone, and a babysitter for her sister.

They were going to the movies, Amber in the backseat, Kim up front next to Dave.

Amber nudged her sister. "Kim. Ask him."

Dave glanced at her. "What?"

Silence.

"Kim!" Amber said a second later. "Ask him!"

Dave was annoyed now. "What the f.u.c.k?"

Kim turned to Dave. "Do you know Craigslist?"

"Yeah."

"You know how they have the escorts on there?"

"Yeah," Dave said. "Wh.o.r.es."

"No, escorts," said Kim.

"Listen, I'm not an idiot," he said.

Kim didn't blink. "What would you think if I were to do that? Would you be mad?"

Dave wasn't about to let on that he would be. "Why would I be mad?" he said. "You're not my girlfriend. Of course not."

Later that night, Amber made it clear to Dave that Kim was asking for them both.

"Can you protect me?" Amber said. "If I do this, can you protect me?"

Dave saw the ad in his head. Sisters.

Amber had asked Bear, too. The guys were on the fence at first, but they came around. Dave told himself that Amber could save enough to find an apartment and restart her life. He told them he wanted nothing to do with the money. He didn't want to think of himself as a pimp. Better to be a bodyguard: Amber and Kim's guardian angel.

Hanging out of view in the kitchen, Dave and Bear would hear Amber-she used the name Carolina on Craigslist-recycling the same old Coed Confidential line to every john: "I'll get as funky as you want dancing, but you're not going to touch me." That boundary had always been easy for Amber to play with, and she knew that flouting the rules was one reason a lot of the men were there. Amber would do little things, such as play with herself, but there were always johns who wanted more for their $250.

Early on, Dave and Bear came up with a way of a.s.suring that Amber wouldn't ever have to go further-an angry-husband scam that stopped her calls not long after she collected the johns' cash. Bear or Dave would barge in just after the start of every date, as soon as the money was collected, screaming b.l.o.o.d.y murder-"h.e.l.l, no! Where's my shotgun!"-and the guys would run out, s.h.i.+tting themselves. "These men would go flying out," Bear said. "I'm talking naked, d.i.c.k swinging, out the front door." The routine didn't always work. Once, Bear came through the front door and saw a huge black guy, built like a linebacker. The guy was stone-cold angry. "I'm not leaving without my money," he said.

Bear broke character. "Give the man his cash," he said to Amber.

The phone never stopped ringing. Dave and Bear were amazed by how easy Craigslist was; the money came straight to their door. They didn't know it at the time, but Carolina was starting to make a name for herself in chat rooms and on websites for johns, like the Erotic Review and UtopiaGuide and Longislanderotic.com. On July 11, 2010, a john complained about getting robbed by some men with baseball bats after paying a girl named Carolina two hundred dollars for s.e.x. Another member of the group asked for the address. No one from this board needs to be involved, he wrote. I have friends who can take care of this s.h.i.+t. The angry john supplied the address and Amber's number. Three days later, someone named Morrie posted a message: A friend of ours told me today that "You won't hear from those 2 girls anymore." But nothing had happened to Amber-not at that point, at least-and the three of them kept on going.

Kim was posting ads, too, under the name Italia. Sometimes she worked with Amber, sometimes alone. Kim had the keys to Dave's house, but she came around only when she needed money or she knew that Amber had some. When she could upsell the johns for s.e.x, Kim sometimes made five hundred dollars. Two calls like that and she had enough to call it a day. For long stretches, Kim wouldn't work at all, perhaps because she felt Amber was making more than enough for them both. Whenever Kim was short on money, she would call Amber and tell her to post an ad. Amber would say no, and they would quarrel: "Are you kidding me? You go do it." "No, you do it." But most of the time, Amber would post the ad and make some money, and along would come Kim again, inviting her sister on a shopping trip.

Amber needed Kim in spite of it all. Dave and Bear came to believe that Kim looked at her sister as a burden-and this wasn't something that Kim ever really denied. Dave remembered her saying once, "If it wasn't for her p.u.s.s.y, I wouldn't have anything to do with her. Because her f.u.c.king p.u.s.s.y makes money."

Bear was the first to start using again. He hadn't stopped for long. Every day he took the train from West Babylon to get his methadone at the Greenwich House on Delancey Street on the Lower East Side. Greenwich House was a quick walk from Tompkins Square Park. Bear knew dealers on Crusty Row-"the a.s.shole of New York," as he put it, the southwest corner of the park, near Avenue A and Seventh Street. So he would get a bundle first and then his methadone.

Amber sweet-talked Dave into driving Bear there once to pick up stuff for her. Then it turned into twice. Dave couldn't stand it. Amber was using now, too. Next came Kim, who would glare at Amber shooting heroin, and then cook up any c.o.ke that was lying around for herself.

One afternoon in June, Dave decided he'd try it, too. Amber wasn't around, and neither was Kim. Bear had some dope but tried to talk him out of it; Dave was the only grown-up left in the house, the sole voice of reason.

"Go f.u.c.k yourself," Dave said. He had never shot up before. "How much should I do?" he asked. "If it's up to me, I'll just put a whole s.h.i.+tload of it together and f.u.c.king do it."

Bear told him he'd wind up killing himself that way. So Dave diluted two bags to start, then pulled up on the needle. He had been on methadone for so long that what came through the needle brought him finally home.

Each bundle held ten little parchment-paper bags of brown powder. They'd take the powder and dilute it with cold water from the tap, mixing it. The needles came from CVS. Bear needed ten bags, dumped into a cooker, just to feel normal. He'd shoot a whole bundle at once and be fine for the day, stopping long enough to inform his less seasoned comrades that today's heroin wasn't as strong as it was in 1970 or even 2005. "Nowadays it's all f.u.c.king garbage," Bear said.

Dave always shot in his right arm. A whole bundle, too. That would last him three or four hours. He'd shoot up three or four times in a twenty-four-hour period.

Amber shot up everywhere. She spent a lot of time hunting for a spot, adding needle marks up and down her arms right up against her old ones, like a child playing with crayons and tracing paper. Dave wouldn't help; he had an aversion to shooting other people up. Her tolerance was as strong as Dave's and Bear's, though she was basically a third the weight of Dave. She started off doing a bag or two a day and then stepped up quickly to three bags in one hour and two bags another two hours later. By the end of the summer, Amber was doing twenty or thirty bags a day, two or three bundles. Even Bear had never met anyone that tiny who did so much dope.

Each day Dave led an expedition from West Babylon to Tompkins Square Park. Most of the time, Amber felt sick in the morning and didn't want to wait three hours for Dave to come back, so she would go with him. p.r.o.ne to road rage, Dave would grind and gnash his teeth the whole length of the LIE, screaming at other drivers. In the city, Dave would spend anywhere from $250 to $500 for six or seven bundles, a day's supply. On the way back, Bear would already be high, and he'd try to give Dave some, too, just to chill him out. He'd shoot Dave with a needle in the neck-the jugular vein that always bulged from all of his screaming and yelling. Bear used to say he could throw a needle across a room and hit it.

Sometimes they brought home enough to tide them over for the next day. Other times it wouldn't last, and at ten-thirty or eleven at night, Dave would drive back to get some more.

Amber was never sober. The half of her day when she wasn't making money on calls, she spent nodding off. Dave, paradoxically, was hyper-relieved to be feeling serene for once-and felt exhilarated, even euphoric, like he was floating. When Kim could steal away from Mike and the kids, she would come by to smoke crack, and she'd be hyper, too.

Dave lost forty pounds. Now and then he would look at Amber, all eighty pounds of her, doing hundreds of dollars' worth of heroin a day, and it would dawn on him that she was back where she'd started, maybe worse than ever. Dave came to realize that Amber and Kim had reverted to the way they'd lived for years before he came along. This was the way they were. This was their norm. Now it was his, too.

In July 2010, he had a moment of conscience. "Get in the car," Dave said, and Amber freaked out, screaming and crying. He said, "Well, then, you're living on the street. I'm throwing you out of my f.u.c.king house. See if Kim helps you." He took Amber to Beth Israel in Manhattan and dropped her off at the detox. A few days later, Amber came back. Dave stopped pressing the point.

Any pretense about Amber not having s.e.x with her clients had long since faded away. She was the main economic engine of the house, bringing in $1,000 or more some days, though most of the time she averaged about $4,500 a week. That was enough for about $3,500 of dope a week, or $14,000 a month. By August, Dave had sold every car in the dealers.h.i.+p and closed it. Anything worth any money started to disappear, starting with the big-screen TV.

The cottage had holes in the walls where Dave had thrown tantrums. Bear started descending into deep paranoia, convinced that everyone was trying to kill him. This wasn't about having a family anymore; it wasn't even about a routine. Everything of value had been stripped until the house, Bear would say, wasn't even a house anymore. It was a spot.

The neighbors, all too aware of the wh.o.r.ehouse, crack house, and heroin den on their street, called the police constantly. Bear's paranoia was infectious: The housemates would cut the lights at night and use a pair of night-vision goggles of Dave's to look out the windows, checking for saboteurs.

Then one night Amber got hurt. She did an outcall by herself, without Dave or Bear, and Dave got a phone call from her, crying. Dave floored it five exits down the Southern State Parkway, and there was Amber on the side of the road, her mouth bleeding. The guy had beaten her and thrown her out, she said, because she wouldn't blow him.

In August 2010, Bear was walking out of a liquor store near Crusty Row in Manhattan when an undercover cop jumped out of a fake taxi. The cop searched him and found a pocketknife. A more thorough frisk yielded a bundle and a half of heroin in a wax packet in Bear's wallet and three plastic bags of c.o.ke stuffed in his b.u.t.t crack. Bear knew he was done: a convicted felon, collared for felony possession and the possession of a weapon.