Part 11 (1/2)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Did Kim treat Amber well?

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

How?

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

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

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

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

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

II.

THE DOCTOR.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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