Part 7 (1/2)

”This is an anomaly,” he said. ”Don't worry.”

Dormer and his team avoided all talk of a serial killer in the days that followed-”Anything is possible at this point,” said Deputy Inspector William Neubauer, ”because there's so many unanswered questions”-even as they kept searching for more bodies. They shut down ten miles of Ocean Parkway, between Tobay Beach and the Robert Moses Causeway, as teams of officers and dogs combed the bramble. The police from neighboring Na.s.sau County were reviewing their open cases, too, searching for possible ident.i.ties for the skeletons. On Friday, they joined the search effort along with the New York State Police, moving west toward Jones Beach, shutting down the highway most of the day. Snowfall was expected that weekend, adding to the pressure. ”We want to make sure we don't miss anything,” Dormer said.

What he wasn't saying was how unprepared his people were. Four sets of remains found along a beach would be more than enough for any police jurisdiction to deal with. Suffolk County medical examiner Yvonne Milewski guessed the skeletons had been left there for a year or longer, though it was possible that the wind, rain, and salt air along the beach had accelerated their decomposition. It wouldn't be long before, on TV and in print, criminologists and self-styled serial-killer experts would start speculating whether the killer ritualistically cleaned the bones of flesh before shrouding them in burlap and placing them at careful intervals along the highway. Many of the bones were so fully decomposed that it wasn't clear at first whether all four sets of remains had been female. Milewski sent the four skeletons to the New York City medical examiner's office, where a team led by a nationally recognized forensic anthropologist named Bradley Adams set about a.n.a.lyzing them for DNA and signs of trauma. As soon as his DNA a.n.a.lysis was complete, he would upload the information into the Combined DNA Index System, or CODIS, the FBI's national DNA database, to search for ident.i.ty matches.

The one thing Milewski's team didn't need New York City's expertise for was a ruling on whether any of the four bodies was Shannan. Alex Diaz's punch had left Shannan with a unique distinguis.h.i.+ng characteristic. There was no t.i.tanium plate in any of the four jaws. On December 16, the same day as Dormer's first press conference at Oak Beach, the police announced that none of the bodies was a match for Shannan.

Joe Brewer, having decamped to his mother's house in Islip, seemed only marginally relieved. Even if he really had no idea why Shannan had gone running that night, he knew he'd never be entirely free of scrutiny, and no matter where Shannan was, the four bodies on the beach would be linked to her case. ”My life is ruined. I will still be judged forever. I'll have to move. I feel for my daughter,” he said. ”This has been a rough time for me, but I'm not the victim here. Those four girls are the real victims. I just hope there is some sort of ending that will give these families some peace.”

For the second time in under a week, Mari Gilbert was brought low. ”I'm confused,” she told reporters. ”Where is she?” Then she got angry, complaining that the police had ignored the case for months, taking it seriously only after four more bodies had turned up. ”They were acting like it didn't happen,” she said. A sister of Mari's back in Pennsylvania, Lori Grove, brought up that the police hadn't made it to Oak Beach until over an hour after the start of Shannan's 911 call. ”If somebody had gotten there within ten or fifteen minutes, my niece, most likely, would be alive,” she said. ”She was on the phone with police for more than twenty minutes. Why did no one get there?”

Neighbors maintained their standoff with the news trucks in the parking lot, resenting the attention, wondering when life would go back to normal, and while the police awaited word from New York City on DNA matches, the search for Shannan went on. From the Robert Moses Causeway to the Na.s.sau County line, the police charted out a search area, breaking it down into eight four-foot sections of maps they kept in a mobile command center. The highway was marked with bright orange arrows, pointing north to each spot where the remains had been found. Fluorescent orange flags were planted in the earth on each of the four sites. Officers started to weed through the bramble, fanning outward from the flags. Only when the first heavy snows came, just after Christmas, did the police bring the search to a halt. The plan was to come back after the first spring thaw, before new foliage had a chance to grow.

The people of Oak Beach had a reprieve, albeit a temporary one. The investigation entered a quiet period: no arrests, no confirmed ident.i.ties for the bodies, and no more daily police updates from Oak Beach. Dormer created a task force with three supervisors and a dozen detectives, including specialists in cell-phone technology and computer forensics. The task force sought advice from the FBI's Behavioral a.n.a.lysis Unit in Quantico, and in February, a team of federal investigators spent a few days touring the sites, looking at the evidence, and sitting at a round table to brainstorm. Through most of January, they refused to speak publicly about the case. If they found a clue or a suspect, they weren't saying.

Producers for cable TV news have a stable of pundits they turn to during hot crime stories-medical examiners, criminologists, forensic scientists, former prosecutors-and the serial-killer category has its own roster of subspecialists, ready to chime in on what could be learned from bones exposed to weather for eighteen months or longer, and what the burlap and the location might say about the killer's signature. They could fill the airtime talking about how Gary Ridgway was called the Green River Killer because he buried his victims in shallow graves near the river of that name in the state of Was.h.i.+ngton, and how Denis Rader became B.T.K. when it came out that he bound, tortured, and killed his victims. ”It's a calling card,” explained Vernon Geberth, a retired commander from Bronx homicide who has become something of a scholar of serial killers. Based on the placement and reported condition of the bodies, Geberth told The New York Times that he was convinced the killer was a local, familiar with the area. ”He has a reason to be there,” he said. ”The biggest thing on his mind now is whether or not he's going to be linked to this.”

Geberth wasn't alone in that opinion. As early as the first week, CNN was airing speculation that this killer was a clam fisherman who could come to the barrier island undetected from the Great South Bay. Geberth went deeper with the idea on his media rounds, suggesting to the Daily News that the killer had placed the bodies so that he could find them again, returning to the burial ground ”to relive the murders for s.e.xual gratification.” Others concurred that the killer was every bit as systematic and intentional as Joel Rifkin-that his need for intimacy announced itself in the care he took; that he shrouded them in burlap, protecting them from the elements; that he seemed to want to control every aspect of their lives through their deaths, and to continue his relations.h.i.+p with them past death. Now that the bodies had been discovered, Geberth suggested that the killer was ”in a panic state,” but that was no reason to believe he wouldn't kill again.

For the ultimate expert opinion, the Daily News approached Joel Rifkin himself. Living out his days in an upstate prison, Long Island's most famous and prolific murderer couldn't resist critiquing this new killer for leaving all the bodies in one place; Rifkin, at least, had been savvy enough to sprinkle his victims' remains across the tristate area. Yet he suspected that they had a lot in common: growing up lonely, mocked, and bullied; grappling with anger. ”America breeds serial killers,” Rifkin said. ”You don't see any from Europe.” As for the victims, Rifkin said that prost.i.tutes were obvious targets for any serial killer. ”No family,” he explained, occasionally breaking into laughter. ”They can be gone six or eight months, and no one is looking.” This was not a novel insight about serial killers and their choice of victims: The Green River Killer, during his admission of guilt at his 2003 sentencing, had said essentially the same thing.

There was one important and obvious difference between this killer and his predecessors. In Rifkin's day, Craigslist and Backpage didn't exist. Neither did cell phones with GPS. Common sense dictated that technology would help find this killer. The original Craigslist killer, Philip Haynes Markoff, left a digital trail traceable through the Erotic Services page of Craigslist in Boston. He wasn't even a serial killer: He had just one victim, and he'd been found in a matter of days. How hard could it be to find a killer of four?

When, in late January, the DNA samples from all four sets of remains were positively identified, the idea of a signature became impossible to ignore. Maureen Brainard-Barnes, Melissa Barthelemy, Megan Waterman, and Amber Lynn Costello were all about the same age. They all did the same thing for a living. And they all came from other towns, some settling nearby to work. Shannan's disappearance had taken place in the middle of the time line of the other four: Maureen went missing in 2007 and Melissa in 2009, but Megan disappeared just a month after Shannan, and Amber vanished that September. If all five were linked, it meant the killer continued to abduct and murder women even after Shannan's disappearance.

On January 25, Dormer and the Suffolk County district attorney, Thomas Spota, formally acknowledged that the police were looking for a serial killer. Spota took the extra step of appealing to other women to come forward with any information about missing friends or suspicious johns. ”I find it very hard to believe that people engaged in the same business as them [don't] know something,” he said. But Spota didn't seem to understand how dramatically the business was changing, or had already changed. In the Craigslist era, no one knew anyone. Pimps and madams were becoming a thing of the past. Escorts can work from a hotel with a laptop, or in a car on a smartphone. Alone. A missing girl is missing only to the people who notice.

Are you f.u.c.kin' kidding me, Maureen?

Sara Karnes had been gone barely an hour from the Super 8 in Times Square, and Maureen was already calling. It was 12:27 P.M., and Sara was in Matt's car, stuck in traffic on the West Side Highway. All Sara wanted was to get some sleep. She didn't answer.

Back in Connecticut that night, Sara got a call from Al, the big Italian guy she'd met at Tony's p.o.r.n office on her first weekend in the city. ”You hear from Maureen?” he asked.

”No.”

”She called me.”

”Why?”

” 'Cause she couldn't get ahold of you. She got robbed. She said that guy you guys met last night-the guy with the dreads-robbed her for five grand.”

Right away, something seemed out of place. ”How the f.u.c.k did he rob her for five grand? She didn't have that much when I left.”

”Well, she obviously must've pulled something out of her a.s.s,” Al said.

Sara hung up and called Maureen's phone. No answer. She left a voice mail: ”I heard what happened. You need to call me back.”

That same night, Maureen had called her sister Missy, at home in Groton with her husband, Chris Cann, and their three children. On the phone, Maureen kept things light. She didn't say anything about getting robbed or being in trouble, or how she had to be in court the next day, or that she needed cash or she'd be out on the street. She said she was calling from Penn Station. ”Can Chris come pick me up?” she asked calmly.

”Maureen, it's eleven-thirty,” Missy said. ”Chris has to work in the morning.”

”I'll call Will.”

A moment later, Missy's phone rang again. Will had to work, too. Maureen said she had enough money to take the train and would take the next one.

On Tuesday, Missy called Maureen, but she wasn't answering. Maybe she was sleeping, she thought, or maybe her phone was out of minutes.

Will called Missy on Wednesday. He hadn't heard from Maureen, either. Her phone was going straight to voicemail.

On Thursday, Missy and Will called the Norwich police. As soon as they learned what Maureen was doing in Manhattan, the officers stopped taking them seriously. She was an escort in financial trouble; maybe she'd dropped off the grid until she made enough money to set things right. Missy knew that couldn't be true. Maureen would never be willingly out of touch with Caitlin and Aidan for that long.

Missy learned from Sara Karnes where they had been staying. Will and Chris got on their motorcycles for Manhattan. The clerks at the Super 8 blithely claimed to have no memory of the dark-haired woman who had just spent days on end in room 406. The hotel records showed Maureen checking out not on Monday but on Tuesday, the day she was supposed to be back in court. They learned later that she had not kept the appointment to look at the sublet. She didn't get back in touch with Al, either.

Missy rushed to her sister's apartment in Norwich. The entire place had been cleared out. All her sister's things were in a dump truck out front or gone-all of her composition books and all the books she loved to read aloud to her children. Her clothes were gone, too. A friend of Maureen's had taken them all, telling Missy that Maureen had said she could. A short time later, the police told Missy that Maureen's food-stamp EBT card had been used in Norwich. Missy and Will started searching all over Norwich until they discovered that the same friend was using it.

Missy logged in to her sister's e-mail-Maureen had shared her pa.s.sword-searching for clues but also for anything left of the sister she knew. She moved on to the Web, looking for photos of Maureen on adult websites, stories of unidentified bodies, or even women with amnesia. Weeks turned into months, and Missy never stopped calling the police in Groton and New York, pus.h.i.+ng for word on any progress. When an internal-affairs detective took pity on her, Missy learned that one of the last people known to have responded to Maureen's Craigslist ad had been a New York police officer, a Staten Island resident ultimately cleared of any involvement in her disappearance. Then came more silence, more waiting, until Missy learned that the police had picked up a ping from her sister's cell phone-someone trying to access her voice mail, perhaps. The signal registered at a water tower on Fire Island. Police with cadaver dogs and helicopters searched the area but didn't find anything. At the time, Missy was confused; as far as she knew, Maureen never did outcalls on Long Island.

Missy didn't know what to do with her frustration. Once, when she thought of Maureen, it had been about what book she was reading, or who would do the shopping for the kids' birthday parties. Now it was about Craigslist, and incalls and outcalls. She began neglecting her kids, her husband, her job. She forced herself to think of any scenario in which Maureen might be alive. She ran into Maureen's friend Jay DuBrule and started talking about how Maureen might have gotten drugged up and abducted by a s.e.x slaver and forced to work for a human-trafficking ring. Jay found himself hoping right along with her. Better, at least, to think she was alive.

While Missy became obsessed, her brother cast about, adrift, enraged, and morose. And then, he, too, was gone. On August 14, 2009, Will-the baby of the family, a muscular, square-jawed, hard-partying football star from Fitch High School, whose anguish over the loss of Maureen was so intense that he had his sister's name tattooed on his chest-was on his Harley before sunrise near Exit 78 on Route 95, a tricky merge that has since been marked by a traffic sign. Will had been at a party that night with other members of his motorcycle club. A few of his friends were with him on the road. He was out in front, as usual. There was a truck in front of him; the police said its lights were either off or dim. Will seemed to notice the truck only when he was a few feet from the back of its trailer. He slammed his brakes, but it was too late. The bike broke in half, and Will died on impact.

When Missy was seventeen, she'd almost died in a car crash. Maureen, nineteen and already a mother, had sat with her at the hospital, coaxing her back into consciousness. Maureen, Missy, and Will had always taken care of one another. Now there was just Missy, left with nothing but an inkling that it was never supposed to work out this way.

As horrible as Will's death was, even that presented Missy with a strange sense of possibility-a new scenario. She couldn't help playing it out like a movie trailer in her mind: Maureen running away and reinventing her life somewhere; Maureen walking through the door, embracing her, ready to grieve for their brother as a family, ready to come home.

When Maureen didn't show up at the funeral, that put an end to it. Missy knew she was gone for good.

Amanda received eight calls in all. Whoever it was always phoned in the evenings, speaking briefly and calmly, taunting Amanda in a low voice. ”Is this Melissa's little sister? I hear you're a half-breed.”

Amanda's father was black. The caller knew what Amanda looked like.

Her mind flooded. Had this man captured Melissa? Was he holding her prisoner? Was she dead already? Or was this some sort of joke? Amanda seemed to be the only one he would talk to. The time Lynn answered, he hung up.

Steve Cohen, the Barthelemy family's lawyer, told the police about the calls. Only then did they seem to take Melissa's disappearance seriously. Starting with the third call, police traced the signal to cell towers in Times Square and Madison Square Garden. Detectives showed Melissa's picture around at strip clubs. They wondered if the caller worked in midtown and commuted from Long Island. The calls were too short to narrow down the location.

After the third call, Amanda, just fifteen years old, was being asked to function as bait. If he called, she was supposed to draw him out, keep the conversation going. She and her mother spent the next several weeks waiting for another call. Every time the phone would ring, she'd wonder, Is this him, is there another clue? Once, the caller seemed to toy with Amanda, asking if she knew what Melissa did for a living. Another time he said, ”Are you gonna be a wh.o.r.e like your sister?” Little by little, he dropped more hints. He said he knew where she lived, and he suggested he might come after her. Amanda thought he knew exactly what he was doing; that he was enjoying it, controlling every second, revealing himself with steady precision.

The last call came on August 26, 2009: ”I'm watching your sister's body rot.”

Amanda was driven almost hysterical by the calls, not just because Melissa might be dead but because she had been keeping her sister's secret. She had been the only one in the family who traveled to New York and spent time with Melissa, the only one with anything close to an authentic glimpse of what her life was like. Lynn had heard about how they went for mani-pedis and visited the Statue of Liberty. Now Amanda told her the rest: how she would hear Melissa on the phone making dates, and see her on the computer posting photos of herself. She told her mother that Melissa had a car service ferry her back and forth while Amanda waited in the house for her to call and say she was okay.

Lynn had always considered her older daughter a force of nature, independent and self-reliant. Now all she could do was wonder what more she and Jeff could have done to persuade her to come home.

Amanda had a hard time in school, missing cla.s.ses and staying home, depressed. A full year pa.s.sed with no word. Lynn and Jeff threw themselves into their work. Lynn had retired from making meals at Manhattan Manor to help out at the latest incarnation of Jeff's diner. Jeff had pulled up stakes at his inner-city location in Lovejoy, where Melissa had worked some s.h.i.+fts after beauty school cla.s.ses, and found a new spot in Cheektowaga, a suburb to the east of Buffalo. The new diner, called JJ's Texas Hots, was on a four-lane commercial strip lined with dollar stores and Goodwill and Chick-N-Pizza and the Polish Villa and 7-Eleven. Across the street was Resurrection Church, dominating the intersection with an electronic bell that played on the hour. JJ's new building used to be a Dunkin' Donuts, and it showed: the floor-to-ceiling windows around the perimeter, the Formica tables. The doors had handwritten signs on whiteboard in different-colored markers, reading SORRY WE CANNOT TAKE CREDIT CARDS OR DEBIT CARDS and RESTROOM FOR CUSTOMERS ONLY. n.o.body paid attention to either of them. After a while, Lynn and Jeff knew most of the patrons and what they were going to order. The term Texas Hots referred to the sauce as much as the dog-a mild meat sauce with a nice bite; hot enough but not super-hot. It was a family recipe. The connection to Texas was tenuous at best. Jeff's father, a Buffalo native, had opened the original JJ's thirty years earlier.

If the loss of Melissa hung over their emotional lives, JJ's had become the center of their financial anxieties. On bad days, it resembled a house of cards. It had cost Jeff and Lynn about twelve thousand dollars to open the location. It would have cost more, but he brought in some equipment from the old place in Lovejoy. They borrowed the money from relatives of Jeff's, and they felt horrible about the timing. A few months after they opened, the market crashed and the relatives lost their life savings. Not once did they ask for any money back. And when they came in to eat, they got angry if Jeff gave them free food. Both Jeff and Lynn spent nearly every waking hour there, each working seventy-two hours a week or more. Lynn's little sister, Dawn, came by to work a s.h.i.+ft after her full-time job as a bank teller. Lynn's father, Elmer, washed dishes after pulling a full s.h.i.+ft as a maintenance worker at Canterbury Woods, a well-heeled a.s.sisted living community that opened after Manhattan Manor. Lynn's mother, Linda, had helped get the place ready, scrubbing the floors and walls and painting.

The older generation was overextended. Linda had taken advantage of the loose standards for credit and signed a home-equity loan to buy a new in-ground swimming pool. When she died of heart failure just weeks after Melissa disappeared, the debt was on her estate. Elmer got a lawyer to tell the pool company that if he declared bankruptcy, everything he had would go toward the mortgage. They gave up trying to collect. He never declared bankruptcy, and he kept the pool.

Melissa's grandmother had lived just long enough to learn the truth about what her granddaughter had been doing in New York. Elmer, Lynn, and Dawn were convinced that the loss broke her heart. Elmer put on a brave face for a few months but soon sank into a deep depression. When he wasn't helping out behind the counter, he'd be sitting in the restaurant, telling strangers about his wife and his granddaughter, telling old stories about them both, treading lightly on the reasons for Melissa's disappearance. Elmer had failed a stress test but refused to do anything about it. If his time was up, he said, he was ready to join his wife. Lynn worried about him. So did Dawn, who from time to time tried to snap her dad out of his funk. ”I know how you feel,” she'd say. ”I don't have it as deep as you, but you really have to snap out of it. You have to see the light. There is light . . . No child can do anything wrong.”