"Is it stripping?" Jeff asked.

Melissa was nonchalant. "Oh, yeah, we just take our tops off. There's no touching."

Lynn wasn't sure what to say. "You know, I'm not around the corner. It would take me eight hours to get to you."

Melissa rea.s.sured them that she never worked alone, and Lynn knew Melissa all too well to force the issue.

Melissa didn't talk much about men. She did say that her old childhood boyfriend, Jordan, was history-that she'd left him soon after arriving in New York, for Johnny Terry, the guy who had lined up the hairstylist job for her before she moved. On the phone with her mother, Melissa would laugh and say, "Oh, Johnny and Jordan, they can't stand each other."

The summer after Melissa moved, Amanda asked to visit her in New York. Despite everything that Melissa had told them, Lynn was all right with it. Amanda was so different from the teenager Melissa had been-docile, even-keeled. Rather than worry that Melissa would be a bad influence, Lynn hoped that Amanda would keep Melissa in their orbit and maybe even persuade her to come home.

Amanda visited for the first time in the summer of 2007. She saw where Melissa was living. The bas.e.m.e.nt apartment in the Bronx wasn't exactly legal; there was no real division between Melissa's room and the upstairs level, where a quiet family lived. Amanda couldn't believe the number of Melissa's cats, too many to keep them straight. Melissa, it appeared, had grown a formidable soft spot for strays.

Amanda also met Johnny, though she quickly learned that no one called him that. Everyone called him Blaze.

Kritzia thought Melissa was lucky, in a way, to have fallen in with Blaze, because even if he wasn't enough of a fighter to protect her, everyone knew Blaze was close to Mel, Kritzia's pimp, and no one would ever make Mel angry. Kritzia and Melissa soon learned they could mess with practically anyone and not worry about reprisals. When rival girls went after them, their men would stop them, telling them there was nothing to be done. Thanks to Mel, they were bulletproof.

Mel and Blaze called each other brothers and operated like business partners. Mel was the muscle, solidly built, with a reputation throughout Times Square as not just a pimp but a drug dealer. After going through a few bad pimps, Kritzia had chosen Mel. She was as infatuated with Mel as any girl could be with a pimp, but it wasn't quite like that with Melissa and Blaze. Blaze was flashier and funnier, as well as less menacing. His whole persona-the flyboy, the pretty boy, the player-made him come off as a phony, trying too hard. There were rules for pimps, too, and Blaze ignored a lot of them. Pimps can't have s.e.x for pleasure. The only girls you can sleep with are the girls who are paying you. But Blaze would go to a club and pick up girls-square girls, not working girls. Blaze might have thought he could do that because he never considered himself a real pimp-he was, he thought, above that kind of work.

Blaze and Mel shared a house on Watson Avenue in the Bronx. Kritzia and Mel had the master bedroom. Blaze had a smaller bedroom that he kept to himself. Melissa begged Blaze to let her live there, too, but he said they didn't have s.p.a.ce. The real reason was clear, at least to Kritzia: Another girl, Em, was Blaze's bottom b.i.t.c.h-the girl with the most seniority. At times the situation got the better of Melissa. She'd lose her temper and scream at Blaze: "I'm tired of you using me up to take care of your wife." Em knew how to protect her position. She would sob and wail and accuse Blaze of not loving her. The situation never changed.

When talking with Melissa about the life, Kritzia often overflowed with conflicting emotions-sentimentality and self-pity, remorse and fury, repulsion and attraction. "Let me tell you, Manhattan is disgusting," she would say. "All these frickin' rich people with all this money who just want to blow it on c.o.ke and hookers. And then a whole bunch of homeless people, sleeping on all the corners, cold, hungry, smelling like urine. And then a whole bunch of prost.i.tutes, trying to make cash. And then we all get to know each other." Melissa didn't see it like that at first. Everything about her had a conspiratorial quality: the smirks, the insolence, and the teasing, punctuated by her saying, "Right?" and laughing. When Melissa came to hang out at the house on Watson Avenue, she and Kritzia would spend the whole time in a bedroom, sealed away from Em and everyone else.

With Mel's muscle backing up their every move, Melissa and Kritzia were emboldened. All the other girls were too scared to speak up and do whatever it was they wanted to do. Kritzia and Melissa, they just did it. They would walk on a sidewalk occupied by pimps. When they saw the other pimps' girls with a trick, they would go up to him and try to steal the trick. "Honey, don't do black, do white," Melissa would coo. "You know it's the only way to go." They got tattoos together. Melissa's said Blaze, Kritzia's said Mel. Melissa had wanted Kritzia to choose the same spot she did, on her back, but Kritzia wanted hers on the back of her neck, where n.o.body would see it but Mel.

They worked together a lot. Guys liked the duo. Once a guy told Kritzia, "You're pretty, but I need something more." When he saw Melissa, he was like, "Oh, you two are perfect. Skinny and t.i.tties, t.i.tties and skinny! Ooh!" Kritzia shook her head at how stupid that sounded. For one john, they took a bath at the Marriott Residence Inn, earning four hundred dollars each. They met a guy who wanted human waste on him. Kritzia couldn't do it, but Melissa did. She wanted the extra money. He wasn't even masturbating while it happened. He just lay in the tub in his room at the Intercontinental Hotel.

They saw how worn out some of the other girls were-their eyes sunken, their faces saggy. "Wrinkled!" they would shriek. "How can you be wrinkled at twenty?" To ensure their own future viability, Melissa and Kritzia came up with a few methods of screening johns for safety. A guy with a briefcase probably just came from work, had a life, and was less likely to be trouble. A guy staying somewhere nice-at the Waldorf, the Sheraton, the Parker Meridien, the Westin, the W-wasn't likely to be in the mood for any drama, only a good time. And older men were always preferable to the young ones. Kritzia made that rule after one too many young guys tried to attack her, alone in a room. In hindsight, she realized how suspicious she should have been: Why would a young guy pay when he could get his mack on for free? A guy like that had to be messed up.

The guys who annoyed them the most were the young white guys. They were stingy-they wanted to pay fifty for everything-and then they wanted to boast about it before, during, and after: "I don't have to do this, I'm doing it to help you out." Melissa and Kritzia would have to keep from scratching out their eyes. You want to help me out, give me a little money and get lost! That's how you help me out.

On the other end of the spectrum were the johns who bought them dinner, took them to the movies. One guy took Kritzia shopping for a dress and shoes and asked her to model them for him. They went back to his place on Eighty-sixth Street, and he took pictures and gave her three hundred dollars and said goodbye. Another guy played dominoes with her. Still another filled her iPod with music-Christina Aguilera, Britney Spears, whatever she wanted. Another guy, he just wanted company. When he fell asleep, she left.

Countless johns wanted to do c.o.ke, which was always welcome. Most of the time, after a line or two, their little friend wouldn't cooperate, so they'd be there for hours, racking up a sizable bill while waiting to get hard. Kritzia would wonder about these men-with too much time and too much money, men who just killed time with a hooker. Guys like that would want the girls to do c.o.ke, too. They knew ways to fake it-instead of sniffing it with the rolled-up bill, they'd lean down to block the john's view and pretend, sniffing nothing and sweeping the c.o.ke on the floor in one swift motion. The art of the swindle extended to s.e.x. Sometimes a guy was too drunk or high to notice that he was having s.e.x with the girl's hand. If someone complained, all she would have to say was "No, honey, we have to hold the condom in place."

At times it seemed almost like a game-how quickly they could turn around a call, how much money they could take. They ran scams together, running to the bank to pull money off of debit cards lifted from their johns. Some guys would foolishly send them to an ATM to get the cash to pay them, naively giving them cards and PINs. Why should they take out only a hundred dollars? They took everything the guy had and threw the card in the garbage.

They got busted together. Once, they were at the Hilton and stole a hundred dollars from a guy who ran after them in his underpants even though it was almost snowing outside, the little crystals that drift down right before it snows for real. The guy caught Kritzia, but Melissa kept running. Then Kritzia broke free, caught up to Melissa, and grabbed her by the hair as payback for having left her behind. Melissa fell and lost one of her heels, then started running off balance. That was when the police grabbed them both, and the john, too.

While Kritzia spent a fair amount of time in jail, Melissa seemed to get bothered by the police less. She had just one recorded arrest, on September 12, 2008, at Sixth Avenue and Forty-sixth Street. The following April, she pleaded guilty to attempted prost.i.tution, a misdemeanor, and was sentenced to five days of community service. Melissa once told Kritzia that a cop tried to get a b.l.o.w. .j.o.b before he let her go. Kritzia believed her; it had happened to her, too.

Kritzia really liked weed, but Melissa couldn't tolerate it. Two pulls and she'd run around thinking she could fly, and she'd still be high the next morning. Instead, Melissa would drink a lot. It wasn't that she drank for fun-she drank to be okay, to mellow out. They'd go to a deli in the fashion district, just south of Times Square, whenever Kritzia got the munchies; Melissa would order only a cup with ice. Then she'd pull a beer out of her purse and pour it into the cup. Kritzia never met a white girl who did anything like that. She told Melissa not to do it while she worked, but she would go on a date, and a guy would offer her a drink, and she'd take it. "You don't know who opened this bottle!" Kritzia said. But Melissa seemed to trust everybody, as if n.o.body would ever harm her. When Kritzia tried to call her on it, Melissa would say, "So what?"

Melissa had advice for Kritzia, too; usually about her hair. One night they got into Blaze's car together, and Melissa smiled. "Mariah, it's time for you to start cutting your hair-your ends are getting all burned."

Kritzia snorted. "What do you know about ends being burned?"

"Girl, I went to school for hair! Come over sometime. I'm gonna fix you up."

"Uh-uh."

"Come on, Mariah! Let me, let me!"

"No, I'm good."

"A long time ago, I dyed my hair red," said Melissa. She reached in her purse and pulled out a picture of her with her hair dyed red, in a ponytail. The picture had the posed quality of a school photo, Melissa facing forward, smiling like she was ready to show up for cheerleading practice. Kritzia would remember that picture later.

Melissa kept talking about Buffalo with Kritzia, if for no other reason than to mention her little sister, Amanda. When Kritzia told her she also had a sister, Melissa said, "We should all go hang out one day!"

Kritzia gave her a look. "Can you imagine, them and us?"

Melissa didn't skip a beat. "Yeah, we should just take them shopping, and they won't ask us any questions!"

Holy s.h.i.t, Kritzia thought.

Lynn met Blaze only once over the years, a short h.e.l.lo in an Atlantic City casino. Lynn and Jeff had gone there on a trip with friends, and Melissa persuaded Blaze to drive her there to meet them. They stayed for a few hours, long enough to talk and play the slots. Lynn didn't like the way Johnny, as she knew him, was dressed, a giant baggy T-shirt and jeans tenuously attached to his waist. This was Jordan all over again. Melissa troubled her, too. She was wearing a cream-colored dress and spike heels. Lynn thought she looked sleazy. When she said as much, Melissa sat up a little straighter. "I look beautiful," she said.

Blaze snorted when he heard that. "I look better than you do," he said.

Amanda didn't like Blaze, either. She thought he was a pretty boy-vain and petulant. Every conversation had to be about him. Amanda's first visit to the Bronx was low-key but fun. Afternoons were for the sisters-shopping, the Bronx Zoo, the Statue of Liberty. The nights were Melissa's alone. She would throw on a dress, and a car would be waiting, and she would leave Amanda at the apartment by herself, telling her not to leave, calling to check in before Amanda went to sleep. Mornings, Amanda would hang out on the stoop, waiting for Melissa to wake up from her night out.

A year later, in the spring of 2008, Amanda visited Melissa again. This time things seemed much bleaker for Melissa. She had broken up with Blaze and didn't talk about him much anymore. Maybe it was that the surroundings weren't so new this time; in any case, Amanda saw through to the bare facts of what her sister was doing to herself. She understood that there might never have been a hair salon, at least not one run by Blaze. She saw Melissa on the computer, a laptop she'd bought secondhand, posting ads on Craigslist, and she saw the cars that picked her up-livery cabs, mostly. She saw it all.

But Amanda was nine years younger than her sister. She didn't know how to talk about something like this. Amanda and Melissa never discussed where she went in the black cars. And when she returned home, Amanda didn't tell a soul what she had discovered.

One day in Times Square, Melissa said to Kritzia, "Mariah, why don't you come with me?"

Kritzia squinted. "Go with you? Go with you where?"

"Go with me-we're just gonna go."

"Where?"

"Let's go to Buffalo."

"h.e.l.l, no!"

Melissa seemed so sad. Kritzia knew she had been fighting with Blaze. And she had mentioned that her mom was putting pressure on her to come home. The street was getting harder for her. Melissa didn't like walking all night. She told Kritzia, "This is not for me. I just can't be here." To Kritzia, that was the worst paradox of the life. You had to be strong enough to work hard and long in order to convince so many men to part with their money, but weak enough to be there in the first place.

Kritzia started to see Melissa doing calls without Blaze around. Melissa said, "Shhh! Don't tell."

"b.i.t.c.h, what are you doing?"

Melissa waved her off. "Oh, Mariah, n.o.body can do nothing to me."

Melissa had more than enough reasons to leave Blaze. She lived on her own and, most of the time, paid her own rent. The two of them were touch and go, a pattern of breakup and reconciliation. Toward the end, Melissa wasn't giving Blaze anything close to all her money. Why should she, she thought, when she didn't have a reliable pimp like Mel to protect her? Thanks to Blaze, Melissa had slammed right into the system's great fallacy: Why should she sacrifice herself to a pimp who spent all her money when he didn't even look after her?

By 2008, Melissa had switched almost entirely to Craigslist. She wasn't the only one. Kritzia had another friend, Fabulous, who did it, too. In the few years since the website had caught on, Craigslist had done more to delegitimize the age-old system of pimps and escorts than a platoon of police officers could. Why sign on with a pimp when it was so easy to take a picture and let a guy call you-way easier than walking the streets and looking for a guy and then trying to convince him and then waiting forever at the ATM while he tried to sober up enough to remember his PIN? With Craigslist, johns came to you, and you didn't have to share the money with anybody.

Melissa asked Kritzia to join her. Kritzia refused. She was scared. The streets weren't easy, but you could see a guy first. You couldn't get to know him well, but at least you could make a snap judgment, look in his eyes, check out his clothes, see his cash, and a.s.sess his body language. As far as Kritzia was concerned, with Craigslist, you were completely in the dark. Every time you met a client was another roll of the dice, with only a few seconds on the phone to suggest if the person was for real-not a cop, not a crook, not a psycho.

As Chloe, Melissa advertised outcalls only: She'd only go out to a john's place. She charged $100 for fifteen minutes, $150 for a half hour, $250 for an hour, and $1,000 for overnight. She was openly breaking her arrangement with Blaze. She made enough money to come home to Buffalo at Christmastime and take Amanda and Lynn to a spa for ma.s.sages. "You deserve to be pampered," she said. On Christmas morning, Amanda and all the cousins each unwrapped an iPod Touch.

There were consequences. A few weeks after she returned, Melissa got jumped by a group of women with one man nearby. Police later said she had her cell phone and that a witness picked it up off the ground and tried to give it back, but Melissa was curled up in a ball and wouldn't take it. The witness heard the man say something like "This is what you get for disrespecting me." He later identified that man as John Terry-Blaze-from a photo the police showed him.

On the last night of the Christmas visit, Jeff and Lynn got Melissa so drunk that she got down on the floor and started playing with Emily, his dog, barking at the top of her lungs. They'd been out at Neighbor's pub on Cleveland Drive, just down the street from Jeff's parents' place in Cheektowaga, and Melissa had been putting away 7 and 7's. When they came back, she had some beers. Now it was two A.M. Jeff tried to shush her, but she wouldn't stop: "Come here, Emily! Woof! Woof! Woof!"

Jeff's parents were asleep down the hall, but they were both going deaf, so it didn't really matter. Still, he was reminded of what a lightweight she was, so tiny that three drinks would put her over. She pounded them down, anyway.

That night at Neighbor's, Jeff had tried, as usual, to introduce the idea of Melissa coming back to Buffalo. There seemed to be a little more urgency, in Jeff's view: Melissa wasn't acting like herself. Something was bothering her. She just was not happy. After the barking fit ended, she lay down on the couch, resting her head against Jeff, and he tried again.

"Come home," he said. His sister-in-law ran a cosmetology school. He could get her a job there.

"Not yet," Melissa said. "I'm almost ready, though."

The Bronx. July 12, 2009.

On July 11, Melissa sent a late-night text message to Amanda to firm things up for another visit to New York. The next day, the security camera of her local bank recorded Melissa depositing a thousand dollars into her account-the proceeds, it is believed, from a date she'd had earlier that night. She withdrew a hundred dollars before heading out the door.

Melissa was seen alive that afternoon, July 12, sitting on the curb outside her building on Underhill Avenue in the Bronx. Her phone records show a call to Blaze that evening, under a minute long. It might have gone to voice mail. Blaze would later say that he knew Melissa had lined up another thousand-dollar date the next night, somewhere on Long Island. He even said he knew the place and knew of the john. But he said that Melissa was working on her own; he'd offered her a ride that she'd declined.

The next day, when Melissa stopped returning all calls and texts, Lynn and Jeff called off Amanda's trip and began calling local hospitals. Melissa's landlady got worried, too, when she heard the cats crying and scratching at the door. Lynn and Jeff tried to file a missing-persons report. But for three days, the police deflected them. They said Melissa was twenty-four years old with no history of mental illness and no psychiatric prescriptions; just because her family couldn't find her, they said, didn't necessarily mean she was missing. If Lynn wondered whether police weren't interested in searching because Melissa was an escort, she didn't have to wonder for long. The Buffalo police said as much to the family's attorney, Steven Cohen. She's a hooker, they told him. They weren't going to a.s.sign a detective to something like this.

Only ten days later would the police start a missing-persons investigation. Only then would they subpoena Melissa's phone records, canva.s.s the neighborhood, and pull a DNA sample from her toothbrush. That was when they learned that her phone records showed access to her voice mail on the night of her disappearance, and that the calls were traced to a cell tower in Ma.s.sapequa, Long Island. Only after that-nearly two weeks after she went missing-would the police visit two nearby motels, Budget Inn and Best Western, to speak to the staff and review security tapes, and find nothing.

The police might not have been stirred into action at all if, on the fourth day of Melissa's disappearance-July 16-Amanda's cell hadn't rung in Buffalo. When she saw her sister's number on the caller ID, Amanda rejoiced. "Melissa?"

Instead of her sister's voice, she heard another: controlled, comfortable, soft-spoken. Male.

"Oh, this isn't Melissa."

ANGELINA.

Alex had been driving for World Cla.s.s Party Girls every day for months, and every day he'd meet someone new. Most of the girls, he forgot right away. But he remembered Shannan.

She stood out-the full lips, the wide eyes, the dark skin, the smile. She introduced herself as Sabrina. Later, she'd be Madison, and then Angelina. He was picking up Shannan and another girl outside the Journal Square PATH station. He a.s.sumed they were both coming in off the commuter line connecting Jersey City to Manhattan. In Alex's Cadillac, the other girl was quiet and forgettable, at least to him. Shannan chatted nonstop, at home with herself and what she was doing. She said she was working as a receptionist, and she picked up the newspaper one day and saw an ad for the agency, and she wanted to give it a try. She called them, and they called her back and said come on in. She was hired on the spot.

Alex could see why. The other girls looked hot, but once they spoke, he understood why they were in this line of work; he could see it in their blank stares, or the way some of them would grind their jaws. Shannan was not only pretty but well spoken, intelligent, charming. As he drove Shannan to her appointments that day, he struggled to understand why she was doing this at all.

Alex Diaz was born and raised in Jersey City, in a two-bedroom apartment not far from Journal Square. His father worked downtown in maintenance jobs. His mother was a housewife. An only child, Alex went to d.i.c.kinson, the enormous high school on a hill that drivers pa.s.s along the elevated highway connecting the New Jersey Turnpike to the Holland Tunnel. Alex didn't graduate. He was arrested at sixteen for fighting-aggravated a.s.sault-and then at seventeen for taking part in an armed robbery. He and his friends wore masks and held up the bodegas on Kennedy Boulevard. Getting a gun wasn't difficult in his part of Jersey City-there were a few older guys who sold them, $300 or $400 for a .22 or a .45. Alex hid his in his bedroom closet at his parents' place. One night he and his friends stole about five hundred dollars-a lot, for them-and ran right into the police.

Alex went away to a juvenile facility in Secaucus, then the New Jersey Training School for Boys in Jamesburg. He served two and a half years, most of it housed boot campstyle, in barracks with fifty other juvenile convicts. A few were friends he knew from the streets. His parents visited. They were upset, especially his mother. "When you come home," she said, "try to do a better job. Try to fix up your life." When he got out, Alex was almost twenty years old. He finished high school at night and enrolled in community college for a year and a half, then lost interest. He never had a major. He felt like he was wasting time.

He thought about studying criminal justice, but his previous gun charge meant he couldn't ever become a police officer. The next best thing was private security. He guarded factories and water facilities and the parking lot of the Prudential Center in Newark. He was making about twelve dollars an hour. All his friends from childhood had gone their own way, gotten older; some had kids. Alex had just one old friend, one of his partners in the bodega robbery. He was the one who told Alex about World Cla.s.s Party Girls.

The agency was run by an entrepreneur named Joseph Ruis, whom Alex knew as the owner of a kebab house he frequented in Journal Square. Alex had no idea that Ruis was also running an escort service with dozens of girls and almost as many drivers. But Alex's friend did, and through him, Alex learned quickly how it worked to be a driver. Simply put, the more girls he drove, the more money he'd make. But it was never that simple. Not every girl charged the same rate, and how much Alex made depended on how much each of them took home. To keep things straight, the agency gave all the drivers and girls a chart-a little like a tip calculator-with all the different possible hourly pay rates, broken down into separate shares for the agency, the driver, and the girls. The driver would always get the least, about a quarter, and the agency and the girl would get pretty much equal shares of the rest.

Drivers usually supplied their own cars. The service had a dispatcher in the main office who called Alex on his cell. At first the dispatcher wouldn't send Alex on the expensive calls. Even at the bottom of the pay scale, the hourly rate for a girl was never lower than $200. Of that, Alex would get $45 or $50, ending the night with $300 or $400. If he worked three or four nights a week, that would bring him $1,000: not bad for a twenty-one-year-old with no college degree.

The more expensive the call, the larger the driver's take-$400 an hour would earn him as much as $120 for that one hour. He'd go all over Manhattan, Rutherford, the Meadowlands, and North Jersey. The farthest south he'd go was central Jersey, like Middles.e.x County. Most of the calls came from the suburbs and Westchester County. In the city, he'd bring girls to the Marriott in Times Square as well as more expensive places, like the Carlyle on the Upper East Side. The rates were far higher than anything a girl on the street would charge, and the clientele was different, too: travelers with lots of money, willing to pay for the convenience of a girl arriving at their door. There was built-in pressure for all of these dates. The guys ordered an hour and often wanted to make the most of it, but the girls wanted to finish as fast as they could and get out. What the guys didn't know was that the escort service had an unspoken rule: During an hour's call, after forty-five minutes, they were supposed to be on to the next call.

Some of the girls, including Shannan, would bring c.o.ke to help extend calls past an hour or two. When they didn't have c.o.ke, the agency would be there to help. "You want some party material?" the dispatcher would ask the john. He would say, "Yeah," and the agency would send it over with Alex, charging it to the john's credit card. Sometimes Alex would buy the c.o.ke himself. He'd lived in Jersey City his whole life. He knew the right people.

The money was great, but the stress was terrible. Alex would work until four or five in the morning, and then he'd turn around and start his regular job at seven. For a while he told his parents that he was going out, and then he said he had a second job driving go-go girls to parties. Keeping the secret only added to the pressure. He started losing sleep, worried that the girls had drugs on them and the police would find drugs in his car, worried that the police would look at the girls in the back and decide that he was a pimp. Sure enough, two months into the job, he got pulled over along Route 3 in Little Falls, New Jersey, with a girl in the back. Alex tried giving the cop the runaround: "She's my friend." He got lucky.

That was too close a call. Alex walked away from the job for four years. He went back to being a security guard, making $13.50 an hour. He had a girlfriend, a normal girl with a normal job and a normal life. Then his expenses piled up. He was financing a new Cadillac CTS. After he paid off all his other bills, he never had any money for himself, for fun. The old friend who had first connected him with Joseph Ruis told him that World Cla.s.s Party Girls had grown. It was big now-celebrities, lawyers, doctors. The minimum call was now $400 or $500. That got Alex's attention.

His first night back, he made almost $1,000. He didn't tell his girlfriend.

During his first tour of duty, Alex had never felt in control. But he was older now, more self-a.s.sured, not a kid anymore. He kept his security job until they fired him for dozing off. It hardly mattered. He went on unemployment, collecting a check from the government while getting paid handsomely by the escort service.

When his girlfriend asked why he was gone all night, she didn't take the answer well. Alex was a little surprised. In his mind, she should have respected him, maybe been proud of him for taking charge and making money. She didn't see things that way. "You might do something with one of them," she shrieked, "and get me a disease!"

Alex gave her some money to calm down. They stayed together. He told her it wasn't about the girls, and he meant it. Then he got to know Shannan.

About two months after their first meeting, Alex was a.s.signed to drive Shannan again. He remembered her. He wanted to talk to her more this time. He was happy when she sat up front in the Cadillac, leaving another girl alone in the back.

She talked, and he listened. She was living upstate, taking a bus to Manhattan from Rockland County and the PATH out to New Jersey to work for the agency. Alex guessed she did that to be as far away from home as possible. Maybe she didn't want her boyfriend or family knowing. She told Alex that she had finished high school early, skipping a grade. She brought a thick textbook in the car, and he marveled at how fast she was reading it. She told him she liked writing, too. That was something Alex hated. But Shannan wrote poetry. She said she used to write crazy stuff-sometimes sweet and cute, sometimes ugly and aggressive. She enrolled in online college cla.s.ses, and she was trying to sing professionally, heading into Manhattan during the day for cattle-call auditions.

She said she wanted to be famous. It seemed to Alex that the job with the escort service scratched the same itch in a different way, bringing her attention, adoration, and money. He wasn't interested in making that comparison directly. Instead, he told Shannan to go for it. "Maybe you can," he told her. "n.o.body's stopping you. n.o.body's holding you back. Go."

He was more convinced than ever that Shannan had chosen the wrong job, fallen into it accidentally. From there, it was a small step to thinking that he might be able to help her-and an even smaller one to entertaining fantasies of rescuing her.

Their third night working together-their third date, as he thought of it-they made sure to be together the whole time. It was a day shift, and there were not a lot of calls, just two or three. That night they grew even closer. The shift ended, and they kept talking. They found a place to park, and she pulled out a fifth of vodka, and they pa.s.sed it back and forth. She said things to Alex about the work that he hadn't heard from the other girls. She said that sometimes the calls would be just about the s.e.x, and sometimes they would be about keeping someone company-a john paying someone to hear him out. She told him she liked those calls best of all.

What happened next came naturally. They had the money for a hotel, but neither wanted to wait. They had s.e.x in the car. Shannan told him she liked it. He believed her, but only to a point. When she left his car for the PATH station, he thought that would be the last time he'd see her.

He was wrong. The next day, she called him. "I'm coming back to Jersey-do you want to meet up?"

Alex ended it with his girlfriend. He had changed too much. He used to feel like a family man. Now he was an agency man, and Shannan was the perfect girl for his new life. That life had its own rhythm, to which he and Shannan adapted quickly. Sometimes Alex would drive her and sometimes he wouldn't, but it wouldn't matter. On rare nights when he drove her, they would sleep together between calls. When they worked separately, they would meet up every morning and check in to one of the hotels on Tonnelle Avenue. Their favorite was the Washington Motel. The staff knew Shannan and got to know them both. In the hotel rooms, they drank and watched movies and ordered in, like going on a little vacation. Alex liked c.o.ke. An eight ball, or three and a half grams, would go for as much as two hundred dollars, but Alex and Shannan were fine with something smaller, like five twenties, or two and a half grams. They had enough money to splurge.

Shannan moved to Jersey in early 2008, both to be with Alex and to work more. They found an apartment on Columbia Avenue in Jersey City. When he stopped to think about it, their apparent domesticity seemed strange. He'd be driving girls all over the place to have s.e.x, and Shannan would have been having s.e.x all night, and they would meet at the end of every shift as the sun came up, and they would stay in the whole day and then go back to work.

The more time they spent together, the more Alex got to see Shannan's mood swings-cheerful one minute, beside herself the next. She was at her saddest when she talked about her childhood. She told him that she was a foster-care child and her other sisters got to grow up at home. She said she felt like a nomad, always roaming around and never where she wanted to be. When he asked her why, she said she couldn't talk about it. "I don't know," she said. "Maybe because I was a wild kid, they couldn't take care of me." Alex didn't believe that, and he never learned another reason, but he did learn that there were triggers-she'd explode if she thought somebody had lied to her, or if she felt like she was running low on money, or if she was having a conflict with her mother or sisters. Sometimes all it took was for Mari or Sherre not to answer the phone for Shannan to feel rejected-the black sheep all over again. Arguments with her mother and sisters ended with her in tears. Alex would try to come to her aid: "f.u.c.k your sisters!" To his surprise, that sometimes worked. In an instant, she'd brighten, as if the storm had never happened, and they would go watch a movie.

Alex never considered how hard it might have been on Mari and the sisters, dealing with someone so volatile. He was too busy fantasizing about helping Shannan. He started to think that their home together could be the first real home that Shannan ever had.

On her visits back to Ellenville, Shannan seemed different-less combative, more confident. Where once she would shriek at Mari about being abandoned, now she took her mother out to get her hair done. She showed up for birthdays and holidays, determined to cook for everyone and do her sisters' makeup. She brought magazines and ordered Chinese food and handed out bootleg DVDs she had picked up in Jersey City. She'd think nothing of spending nine hundred or a thousand dollars in one weekend. "No one else could compete," Sherre said.

Her job wasn't a secret. Shannan made no effort to dash away from Mari when her cell buzzed. She would answer in a ridiculous code that made Mari laugh-"Hi, this is Julie Smith, is this the pizzeria?"-as the dispatcher gave Shannan the next job. She wouldn't go into much detail about the work-"That was her business," Sherre said-but she had no problem talking about the money. "You would not believe the clients I have," she once told Mari. "They're rich. I hardly have to do nothing, and I get thousands of dollars."

To her family, not just Mari, Shannan was leading such a removed, alien existence that questioning it seemed almost beside the point. Shannan had proved she was smart by graduating early. The money showed she could take care of herself. Her old friends from Ellenville were more scandalized. On the phone one night, her old friend Anthony almost didn't know what to say. "Does your family know?" he asked, and Shannan said, "Yeah. They're letting me live my life." This stopped him short. If his daughter told him she was an escort, he'd s.n.a.t.c.h her and lock her in a room until she came to her senses.

Shannan rea.s.sured him. "I'm only doing it until I'm done with school." He thought there had to be more to it than that, some other reason why Mari and the sisters never took the extra step to make sure Shannan stopped. To Anthony, that reason was clear: She was sending a lot of money home. "The only time I ever seen Shannan and her mom on good terms was when she started in this business," he said, "when she was bringing home money and gifts and stuff like that."

Mari saw how the money had changed Shannan's life and marveled at her taste. In Jersey City, Shannan filled the apartment with four-hundred-thread-count sheets, designer clothes, and a plasma TV. She would take her sisters shopping, to the mall, to the movies. Sherre's sons got Timberlands and Akademiks jackets. For one of the boys' first birthdays, Shannan wanted to bring over a cake from Carlo's Bake Shop in Hoboken, featured on the Cake Boss reality show. Sherre was offended: She wanted to bake for her own son, and here Shannan was, swooping in with her money again. Shannan had more success shopping for her mother. If Mari even mentioned something, it was hers. " 'Oh, the new Stevie Nicks CD is coming out.' 'Okay, Mommy, I'll get it for you,' " Mari remembered.

As far as Shannan was concerned, her choice was a success. The money was washing away years of estrangement. Even Sherre came around to accepting her sister. "We got closer," she said. The plan was working. Shannan's success drew her family-especially her mother-closer to her at last.