At Rikers Island, Bear doubled over in pain, shaking from withdrawal. He saw Amber in court, and she said, "I'm going to get you out." Three days later, Bear was released on a $3,800 bail bond paid by Amber. She'd raised it all herself.

Amber thought she had solved the problem. But Bear had more experience with the police, and he knew the house on America Avenue would be raided any minute. He was worried about himself, too. He was drinking so much liquor and popping so much Xanax, over and above the dope, that an overdose started to seem like a foregone conclusion. The guilt over the mother of his child taking care of his little boy without him was too much. He could ignore that guilt as long as he was enjoying himself. Now he said he had always planned on leaving.

Amber was destroyed by the news. Another abandonment, another betrayal, another family ripped away from her. Bear checked himself in to North Sh.o.r.e University Hospital. He was too sick for a detox. He needed a regular hospital bed, where he was placed in a medically induced coma for the first few weeks. After he came out of the coma, he stayed in the hospital for another three weeks before being transferred to a residential rehab, a condition of his release from jail.

Amber came by to drop off some of his belongings. She still felt scorned. Bear remembers the way she looked then, emaciated. He knew there was nothing he could do to make her happy. She looked him in the eye and handed him the suitcase. With the other hand, she gave him a fifty-dollar bill.

Maybe she was calling him a pimp. Maybe she was reminding him who had gotten him out of jail. Maybe she was inviting him to go somewhere with her and find a use for that money. Maybe it was all those things. But Bear wouldn't take the money. And Amber wouldn't take it back. They were at an impa.s.se.

Finally, she threw it on the floor. "Let it fly off or pick it up," she said, and walked.

When Amber came down to Dave's car, she was all smiles. She told him that she'd met Bear's father and mother, and that Bear had proposed to her, and that the parents were going to pay for them to get an apartment, and that she was pregnant.

All lies, of course. Dave knew that much. He understood. He took Amber back to the house on America Avenue, where she went back to work.

West Babylon. September 2, 2010.

Amber had one call early in the morning, at about eight. She went with Dave into Manhattan to get dope, and they hung out at the house with some old friends of Dave's, getting high and watching movies.

At about four or five P.M., Amber placed an ad on Craigslist. She got some responses, but nothing solid. Amber was on and off the phone with the same guy for a while. He called her and chatted, then called again. She was working her Southern accent, describing her body, and by the end of the day, she thought she had him on the hook. On some calls, Amber would upsell the guys-"You only want a half hour? I got my rent to pay, my landlord is on my a.s.s"-but this guy was different. Even before they met, he was telling Amber that she would walk out with a lot of money.

They arrived at a price: $1,500 for the night. He would pick her up around eleven and have her back by six or seven the next morning. She told Dave. Leaving the house for an outcall was unusual, but something made her trust this guy. Maybe she knew him. Or maybe it was the money. Or maybe with Bear gone, she had less of a reason to think twice.

At the agreed-upon time, she and Dave left the house together. He walked her over to the corner of the lawn, right by the mailbox, and they hugged. She walked down the block. Before heading inside, Dave might have glanced down the street at the taillights of a car. If he did, he was too high to remember.

Kim was in North Carolina when Dave called. Amber had been gone for three days. "Don't worry," Kim said. "She'll come back."

A few more days pa.s.sed. Dave called again. Kim was out of ideas. Bringing the police in seemed like a bad idea. So she did nothing, hoping Amber had found a new crowd someplace.

Bear was sitting in rehab, hara.s.sing his counselors to use the phone every three hours to call Dave. "Is Amber back yet? Is Amber back yet?" Bear just knew she was lying in a ditch somewhere. "Dave," he said, "I'm telling you-this girl is dead."

Interlude: Oak Beach, 2010 Somewhere in the marshes of Oak Beach, past the sumac and the sea gra.s.s, a tiny greenfly lands on a strand of salt hay, a wiry plant, slender but strong, that first thatched the rooftops and insulated the walls and padded the mattresses in the growing city to the west. All through the nineteenth century, while the Vanderbilts and the Astors built estates on Long Island from Great Neck to Huntington, the barrier islands remained wild with salt hay and rich in oysters, small mountains of which soon scored a regular place on the menus of Manhattan's finest restaurants. That lasted a few decades, until too many outboard motors of too many pleasure boats ruined the oystering, and the people of Oak Beach were taught their primal lesson: Be wary of those who might ruin your very good thing.

The seventy-two homes in Oak Beach today are a mix of winterized old beach bungalows and modern McMansion-like Capes. Even now, to live along the windy, fogged-in roads is to resign yourself to a particular set of challenges that the inlanders of Long Island don't face, and without some of the basic comforts enjoyed by your Hamptons neighbors out east. The people of Oak Beach are miles from the nearest supermarket, gas station, drugstore, hospital, or police precinct. Flooding is a constant threat. The marsh beside Oak Beach is a mosquito's paradise, and the poison ivy in the marsh grows higher than the salt hay ever did-as tall as two men and as thick as the branch of a tree. All along the beach are piles of crumbling tombstones brought from the town of Babylon and stacked into jetties to help combat erosion.

The reward is solitude. The people of Oak Beach are there because they want to be left alone. The gate, with its quaint little gatehouse and electronic keypad, is the perfect embodiment of the place's ethos. Walking past the gate is not against the law, but it sends a message. The houses are built on public land and collectively overseen by a homeowners' a.s.sociation that has operated like a miniature government for over a century, its small, clubby leadership screening new arrivals and making rules and generally promoting the idea that, as far as members of the Oak Island Beach a.s.sociation are concerned, their quiet village would be perfect in every way if not for the intrusions of the outside world.

Long before the latest influx of newcomers-before a reckless party boy named Joe Brewer set up a bachelor pad along the Fairway and a boastful doctor named Peter Hackett moved with his family to Larboard Court-Oak Beach was governed peaceably by the a.s.sociation, and neighbors let one another be. The presidency of the board collegially transferred over the years from Ira Haspel, an architect, to Connie Plaissay, a florist, to Gus Coletti, an insurance man, and they still meet regularly in the building that marks the community's first organized effort to live beside something other than a boggy marsh. In 1894 a Presbyterian pastor named John Dietrich Long scored a fifty-year lease from the Long Island town of Babylon, which controlled Oak Beach, to build a religious retreat and cultural center on the public land. In a year's time, the pastor's flock constructed a building large enough to seat a thousand people. A year later, the town of Babylon sold a nine-year lease to the Oak Island Beach a.s.sociation. The terms were a hundred dollars per year from each member of the a.s.sociation, whether a house was built there or not, plus five dollars a year for every house that was built. The town's only requirement was the construction of at least twenty houses.

This same lease, renewed several times, is in effect today, and the Oak Island Beach a.s.sociation continues to manage and oversee life there, collecting a.s.sessments, policing landscaping projects and renovations, maintaining the gatehouse, regulating speed b.u.mps, mediating squabbles between neighbors, and above all, negotiating the terms of the lease every few decades with the town of Babylon. The lease is another reason, beyond the storms and the insects, why the situation at Oak Beach has always been precarious-not just naturally but bureaucratically, politically. Residents there may own their homes, but they don't own the land. Every few decades, the lease comes close to expiring, the town makes noises about taking back the land, and the inhabitants grow anxious, as if they're under siege.

No family of real means would ever own a home on land that could be pulled out from under them, so it stands to reason that the first summer people at Oak Beach would be hardy, self-sufficient, and decidedly middle cla.s.s. In those early years, families came over from the mainland by rowboat, and later on a sidewheeler called the Oak Islander, manned for a time by an ill-tempered, white-mustached sea captain who people said once worked for the Vanderbilts. They walked on wooden planks over soggy marshes to get to their cottages. They cooked with kerosene and pumped from a cistern that collected rain, and they stored meat in barrels buried in cool sand beneath the house. Bathrooms were holes in the ground, garbage cans were holes on the beach. Their days were spent crabbing, clamming, and fluke fishing. At night, the Jones Beach aquacade would host a production of Billy Rose's water ballet. The ride back to Oak Beach was along narrow, rutted roads with no means of illumination; headlights were useless in the mist. Instead, pa.s.sengers stuck their heads out the windows, shouting out warnings to drivers when they feared an imminent collision.

It might have gone on this way forever-remote and romantic, intimate and a little precious-if not for Robert Moses. The master builder of New York, the ruthless visionary who brought parks, highways, and bridges to a bursting metropolis, also happened to be Oak Beach's most famous summer resident. Moses rented a bungalow on the beach with a bay window that afforded him a perfect view of the construction of the causeway and state park that would bear his name. Jones Beach had been Moses's first great triumph, fifteen miles west of Oak Beach. His second act, the construction of Ocean Parkway in 1933, changed the barrier islands forever. The corps of engineers dredged the ocean and filled in the islands and ran the new highway right through the middle.

Ocean Parkway brought the world to Oak Beach. Day-trippers, sightseers, Long Islanders, Manhattannites choking for fresh air, all drove across the bay on the Wantagh, the Meadowbrook, and the Robert Moses Causeway from Babylon, West Islip, Bellmore, Seaford, and Ma.s.sapequa. They came with reels to fish from day boats at Captree Island for fluke, winter flounder, bluefish, mackerel, black sea ba.s.s, porgy, and weakfish. They came to plunder the bay for hard-sh.e.l.led clams, steamers, quahogs, bay scallops, and blue-claw crabs and lobsters. They brought binoculars and hoped for sightings of the piping plover, the least tern, the roseate tern, the common tern, and the marsh hawk. They sunbathed on their pick of "locals only" beaches-Cedar Lookout, Cedar, West Gilgo, and the most popular, unsettled and raw, perfect for surfing: Gilgo Beach.

The people of Oak Beach might have slept peacefully behind their gate all through the tourism boom and Long Island's subsequent great postwar middle-cla.s.s explosion-Levittown, the first modern suburb, was a half-hour drive to the north-and all the teen rebellion and kitsch and car culture that came after that, if an old hotel called the Oak Beach Inn hadn't been built right off the access road that led to their private community. In the seventies, a college dropout named Bob Matherson remade the Oak Beach Inn into the South Sh.o.r.e version of Studio 54. Matherson had grown up farther inland, in Rockville Centre, but he knew what the barrier beaches meant to Long Island's youth. Throngs of partiers came to Oak Beach at all hours, jammed into convertibles, horns blaring, music playing. Drunks stumbled onto the little roads of Oak Beach-Anchor Way, the Bayou, Hawser Drive, the Fairway-and parked cars spilled down both sides of the access road, pa.s.sing headlights affording views of parked cars with steamy windows. When the police tried to crack down, Matherson turned the Oak Beach Inn into a cause celebre. Through the better part of the eighties, a SAVE THE OAK BEACH INN b.u.mper sticker seemed to come standard with every Long Island car. Years later, people are still telling stories of seaplanes landing in the middle of the night with deliveries of cocaine.

With the onslaught of nightlife, the gate became less of a gesture toward civility and more of a necessity. It took until 1992 to get rid of the Oak Beach Inn, and by then the people of Oak Beach had fallen into the habit of measuring their lives as a series of indignities and threats. The dredging projects. The motorcyclists. The ramp for Jet Skis. The plans for condos, a twenty-four-room hotel, and wind turbines. The traffic, pollution, and mosquitoes. And, not least, the government. Old-timers mourned the loss of the old Coast Guard station, and they raged against the town of Babylon for not maintaining the roads, and against the Suffolk County civil servants for encouraging development. "At times, it would almost seem that a callous Bureaucracy has been Oak Beach's princ.i.p.al enemy," native son Ed Meade, Sr.-whose father had manned the Coast Guard station during the early years, and whose own birth took place, unexpectedly, in an Oak Beach bungalow-wrote in a brief reminiscence of the community, completed shortly before his death in 1983. Meade spoke for all his neighbors when he said he treasured the "sense of grace and purpose" of Oak Beach living.

In the early nineties, the town of Babylon raised the fee to about $3,800 per house. The new leases are set to expire in 2050-long enough for buyers to get mortgages but no guarantee that their grandchildren will be able to keep the homes. Some in town still called it a sweetheart deal. No matter what the people of Oak Beach do, they know their hold on paradise is temporary. The end will come at the hand of a jealous town government that will raise the rates on their land leases, or a gradually rising sh.o.r.eline that could sink and flood the cottages, or a storm that might simply wash it all away.

The quintessential Oak Beach tale, or the one that neighbors seem to like the most, is a Norman Rockwell moment that comes across as almost too heartwarming to be true. It was at least true enough to merit mention in a sentimental piece by Newsday columnist Ed Lowe. It's about Joey Scalise, a seven-year-old boy who spent all day fishing off a pier at his house on the water and didn't catch a thing. When his father, Joe Sr., a schoolteacher who in the summer managed the lifeguard stations at Jones Beach, came home and saw his son brought low by disappointment, he turned around and drove across the bay to Babylon and bought a fish, then raced back to Oak Beach, swam up under the pier, and placed it on his son's hook. It was too good a trick to do just once. Years later, Joey, all grown up, noticed the boy next door having the same trouble on that pier. He got in the car and headed for the same market and did the same thing for the boy that his father had done for him. A white lie, pa.s.sed down through generations, to sh.o.r.e up the pretense of an orderly world.

Behind the gate, families remained devoted to their vision of the simple life. Children, when they weren't on the school bus to and from Babylon, spent whole days on the beach or at the a.s.sociation's basketball and handball courts. If they tired of that, there was the menagerie of dogs, chickens, pigeons, and parakeets at the home of Gus Coletti, the insurance man and antique-car enthusiast who kept an impressive collection of fireworks in his garage on the Fairway. They were joined in 1990 by the Hacketts. Peter, a doctor; his wife, Barbara; and their three young children came to Oak Beach, it seemed, for the same reasons the old-timers loved the place. The son of a former administrator at Hempstead General Hospital, Hackett grew up in Point Lookout, a barrier-island community just west of Jones Beach. When he and his family arrived, he was in his mid-thirties, robust and exuberant-well over six feet tall and burly-and working steadily as an emergency-services surgeon. Many neighbors didn't notice his left leg until summer, when he wore shorts. Even then they would look twice at the prosthesis's flat, washed-out shade of yellow, so different from the doctor's sunburned pink skin. While in medical school, Hackett told them, he was on the Northern State Parkway, helping a driver in trouble get off the road, when another car hit him, crushed his leg, and kept on going. He was in the hospital for a year, he said, and since then he'd used a prosthetic leg that never seemed to slow him down.

The Hacketts lived in a four-bedroom cottage on Larboard Court, a short walk from the Colettis and the Brennans. Peter and Barbara were lively and social, making friends with Michael Newman, who ran a large dairy business with his wife, Lisa, who joined a real estate brokerage run by another neighbor, Susie Hendricks. All those families around the hub of Larboard Court and Anchor Way were active on the board of the a.s.sociation. Affable almost to a fault, Hackett became the closest thing Oak Beach had to a kindly country doctor who made house calls. He could also be a braggart, puffing out his chest and playing the big shot in a way that invited resentment, an att.i.tude that ran him into trouble professionally. For two years in the nineties, Hackett had served as the head of EMS for Suffolk County, leading the response to the crash of TWA Flight 800 off the sh.o.r.e of Montauk in 1996. A year after the disaster, Hackett resigned over what he called policy differences with his superiors. Newsday reported on disputes swirling around him, citing critics who painted him as "an erratic would-be hero who embellished his achievements and meddled with the volunteers' work while neglecting his job as an administrator." Hackett had claimed that hours after Flight 800 exploded, the Coast Guard flew him out to the wreckage and lowered him onto the deck of a yacht, where he swam through the fuel-slicked water to examine a body. The Coast Guard later denied that such a thing happened or would have been possible. In another incident, Hackett told his colleagues he'd been searching for survivors in the wreckage of a roof collapse in Bay Sh.o.r.e when, witnesses said, he was nowhere near the scene. Months before leaving his job, Hackett was lambasted one last time for interfering with the rescue of three men when he lowered himself into a frigid water tank that had collapsed at MacArthur Airport. Hackett said he rappelled down, while other witnesses said he climbed down a ladder. His actions were said to have caused some of those men to be injured, an accusation he continued to deny on his way out the door.

Pressured out by his superiors, Hackett took a job in Riverhead, Long Island, as director of emergency services at Central Suffolk Hospital. In 2000, in his mid-forties, Hackett had another health emergency: chest pains that turned out to be the effects of a congenital heart problem. To regulate his heartbeat, he had a pacemaker and cardioverter defibrillator implanted that effectively forced his retirement as an EMT.

Back at Oak Beach, with ample time on his hands, Hackett made it seem like he was always on call, driving around the neighborhood with a flashing red light affixed to his truck, monitoring the police scanner and rushing out whenever the speaker blurped out anything about a jumper on the Wantagh or a disabled vehicle on Ocean Parkway. As one of the only medical men in the neighborhood, he once was called upon to reattach a neighbor's finger and treated a few others with chest pains or heart trouble. But as he had in his career, Hackett earned a reputation in the neighborhood for telling stories. He declared that the enormous kitchen island in his cottage on Larboard Court doubled as an examination table. He'd say he had a background in law enforcement. According to one neighbor, when Hackett heard that a certain teenager had smoked pot, he took him aside and said he worked for the DEA. He seemed almost too eager to resolve any given crisis, no matter how small. According to another neighbor, he heard about a bad case of poison ivy and showed up to offer the afflicted boy a syringe with a steroid, provoking the fury of the boy's father.

In Oak Beach, Hackett seemed determined to be a very big fish in a very small pond. But as polarizing as he might have seemed to some, he fit in well among those in charge of the a.s.sociation. The Hacketts embraced the communal barrier-island life, celebrating every Fourth of July with a neighborhood picnic, and they used the Reverend Long's old community center for "heritage" meetings-a historical-appreciation club spearheaded by the doctor's wife. They mourned when Frank Brennan, a jovial six-foot-seven senior vice president at Cantor Fitzgerald, was killed in the World Trade Center attacks, leaving his wife, Barbara, a widow. They mourned again when old-timers Michael Newman and Don Hendricks died. Their homes all sat near one another off the Bayou, the road in the center of Oak Beach-near the Suffolk County cop, John Bunkhard, and Charlie Entenmann, the pastry king, and Connie Plaissay, the Park Avenue florist. At night, with the waves lapping the tombstone jetties along the beach, they all could go back in time-experiencing, however briefly, that sense of grace and purpose.

The gate could do only so much. The rest of Long Island was becoming a Gothic fun-house mirror of suburban living, an early adopter of the coming decade's reality-show excess. Right across the Great South Bay was Ma.s.sapequa, home of Amy Fisher, whose shooting of the wife of her boyfriend, Joey b.u.t.tafuoco, served as the starting gun for Long Island's long, low hustle toward tabloid infamy. Twenty miles away from Oak Beach was Mineola, where the body of a twenty-two-year-old prost.i.tute named Tiffany Bresciani was discovered in 1993 in the back of a pickup truck. She was one of sixteen women killed by Long Island's most notorious serial killer, Joel Rifkin. Thirty miles away, the body of a twenty-eight-year-old prost.i.tute named Kelly Sue Bunting was found in a trash bin in Melville in 1995; she was one of the five confirmed victims of the area's other great serial killer, Robert Shulman. More recently, fifty miles away, four bodies were discovered in Manorville, including that of a twenty-year-old prost.i.tute named Jessica Taylor, whose head and hands had been cut off. The Manorville killer was never found.

As the people of Oak Beach tried to preserve their way of life, changes were coming from within, where the money was. As much as the rest of Long Island, Oak Beach benefited from the great real estate boom of the nineties. People whose parents paid six thousand dollars for a cottage thirty years earlier had become paper millionaires. The increased value of the land meant more turnovers, more development, more tear-downs, more renovations, more curb cuts, more bathrooms, more screened-in porches, more swimming pools-and potentially, fewer sand dunes. The only ent.i.ty able to stop a leaseholder's plans to remake his old bungalow into a twenty-first-century dream home was the Oak Island Beach a.s.sociation.

After a century, the board remained the center of the neighborhood's money and power, collecting dues from each household and setting rules. How people felt about the way that power was used often depended on how friendly they were with the members of the board. The most active board members were the Hacketts and their friends; Gus Coletti became board president in the nineties after Connie Plaissay. But in a village that was smaller than Mayberry, where everyone was supposed to take care of their neighbors, people now looked at each other with suspicion. Who on the board was building a garage without the right approval? Who was running a business out of their house when the bylaws strictly prohibited that? Which board members were being employed by that business on the side? Were any of those people being paid with a.s.sociation dues? Who was getting two thousand dollars a month from the a.s.sociation for landscaping work, then paying a landscaper five hundred to do it? Then it got more personal: Which board members were out late without their spouses and seen together in parked cars, doing more than talking about driveway permits and sand dunes?

The whispers escalated to open conflict in 2004, when the father from Oak Beach's charming fish story-Joe Scalise, Sr.-and his family were almost driven out of Oak Beach by the a.s.sociation. The Scalises lived in a cul-de-sac on the west end of Oak Beach, down the road a quarter mile or so from the Hacketts and the Cannings and the Brennans, next door to Frank Solina, who wanted to put in a swimming pool without a permit. Frank's good friend was the president of the board at the time, Gus Coletti, who did not object. Neither did the Scalise family until Frank bulldozed a sand dune that Joe liked. When Joe contacted the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation, it was war.

Solina persuaded Coletti to initiate eviction proceedings against the elder Joe Scalise and his son. For the first time that anyone could remember, a special meeting was called of the entire voting population of Oak Beach. The Scalises stood accused-by Coletti and Solina-of tr.i.m.m.i.n.g some trees on a.s.sociation property and putting a snow fence on the beach. The seventy-two homeowners were asked to partic.i.p.ate in a simple up-down vote: Should the Scalise family stay, or should they go? To some, it seemed ridiculous. "I said to Frank, 'You know this is never gonna happen,' " remembers one neighbor, Bruce Anderson. "He said, 'Oh, no, Gus told me he's gonna get rid of them, and he's got a list of other people he'll evict next.' And I said to myself, 'Aw, geez, maybe I'll be on the list!' "

When the vote didn't go the way Solina liked-twenty-one to nineteen against evicting the Scalises-Gus counted three absentee ballots and declared victory anyway. The Scalises hired a lawyer, and tens of thousands of dollars in legal fees later, the courts stopped the eviction on the grounds that the bylaws stated that members had to be present to vote. The judge issued an order for the a.s.sociation to treat the Scalises as members in good standing. A year later, the a.s.sociation, still controlled by Coletti, sued the Scalises again for cutting down trees. That suit was also dismissed. Since then, the Scalise family harbored a grudge against those who ran the a.s.sociation and their friends. They despised Gus Coletti, Frank Solina, and everyone on the board, including Dr. Peter Hackett.

Nearly everyone agreed that the feud had polluted the culture of Oak Beach. The ugliness of the outside world had made it past the gate, so it seemed almost like an afterthought, or a foregone conclusion, when Joe Brewer arrived on the Fairway, taking up residence in his mother's aging two-story Cape three doors down from the Colettis. Brewer was no sc.r.a.ppy South Sh.o.r.e survivor. He was an inland "lawn guyland" guy, unctuous and cloying and cla.s.sless. The Brewer family owned a lot of real estate in central Long Island-apartments, a strip mall, some homes-and Joe, neighbors said, was the family's Fredo. In his mid-forties, paunchy, and unemployed, Brewer once worked on Wall Street but hadn't seemed to work at all in years. His mother's place at Oak Beach became Brewer's to do with as he pleased. The inside was a wreck-piles of junk everywhere, not an inch of floor exposed, nothing ever thrown away, and a pervasive smell of cat. Brewer had a young daughter but wasn't married, and neither the girl nor her mother ever came to Oak Beach. On his way in and out of the house, he always waved to neighbors, smiling broadly and often chuckling at some private joke.

Brewer was not active in the a.s.sociation, but he was no misanthrope. He was the kind of guy who would recognize a neighbor at the supermarket in Babylon and come up and shake hands, animated and hyper, his long monologues punctuated with laughter. Like Hackett, he considered himself a macher, though Brewer could be cruder. To a few people, men he may have wanted to impress, he would confide that the house in Oak Beach was a party pit for him and his friends, "a place where you can do whatever you wanted to do." These weren't Animal House baccha.n.a.ls; they were small affairs with a handful of guys and a woman hired for the occasion. Not that he ever needed to pay for s.e.x, he'd say. As he cheerfully rea.s.sured one neighbor, laughing all the way, "I've had rock-star success with women."

Alex Diaz had kissed Shannan good night on Friday evening at about ten, after their movie in Jersey City. He spent the next day thinking she would be home soon. She never returned, and by Sunday, Alex was concerned enough to try calling. He didn't even get a ring; her phone was shut off.

He wasn't sure what to do. He knew her driver's name, Michael Pak, but didn't have a number for him-or anyone in Shannan's family, for that matter. Finally, he rifled through Shannan's drawers and found a torn piece of paper with some numbers.

He first called Michael, who seemed surprised. "She's not home with you?"

Alex was furious; he was her driver, how could he lose her? Michael told Alex what had happened: how she didn't want to come to the car, how she was irrational, how she said he and the client were trying to kill her, how she ran. Michael said he just couldn't find her.

Alex couldn't understand. Nothing Michael was saying sounded like Shannan. Even when she was high, she didn't act like that. Together, they Googled and found six nearby hospitals and four police stations. Using three-way calling, they dialed them all, supplying her name, her description, her alias. No one had seen her.

Alex asked Michael to connect him with the john. Michael called. A man answered. "What happened to her?" Michael asked.

Joe Brewer laughed. "Oh, man! That's your job. You should know where she's at."

Alex spoke up. "I'm the boyfriend. What happened?"

Brewer was defensive. "I tried to hold her. I tried to tell her to calm down. But she took off."

"Why didn't you try to bring her to the car?"

"She wouldn't," Brewer said. "And then she just took off, really scared."

It didn't sound right to Alex. Michael said she'd been there for three hours already. What would set her off after all that time?

That night, at about eleven-thirty, Alex drove to Oak Beach, the first of three trips he would make in the next week. He was so nervous, he brought a gun, a little .25 he'd had for years. As he pa.s.sed under one bridge, he felt a weird vibe: Getting thrown out of a car along this road could kill somebody.

Brewer came out to meet him at the gate. He looked like he'd been home all day-pants unb.u.t.toned, dirty white T-shirt, stubble. Brewer tried to level with him. "Look, man, she came to my house. We were having a conversation. All of a sudden, I felt uncomfortable with the conversation."

They talked for what felt like a half hour. Brewer kept wanting Alex to follow him through the gate-"Come to my house and search it," he said-but Alex didn't want to. He was worried about what might be waiting for him on the other side.

"You know, I'm gonna call the police," Alex said.

"Okay," Brewer said. "I got nothing to hide."

"I'm going to go to the police station," Alex said. "Do you know where it is? Can you take me there?"

"All right," Brewer said. "Follow me."

Together, Alex and Brewer tried to file a report. Alex remembers the Suffolk County police officers having a hard time concealing their laughter. "She ran away? She'll probably come back to your house. Check your house-maybe she's there now." When Alex said he was from Jersey City, they told him to file a report there.

When Alex got home, he could barely sleep. The next day, he drove back, a photo of Shannan in hand, ready to knock on doors. He made it to the Oak Beach gate at about noon; a neighbor stopped him and asked him to wait. A moment later, a truck pulled up the drive and came to a stop. Out stepped a portly middle-aged man with a pasty complexion. Alex noticed his limp and his prosthetic leg. He lumbered over with surprising speed. The man had an easy smile and bright eyes. He reached out his hand and introduced himself as Dr. Peter Hackett.

The doctor listened intently to Alex, even writing down some of what he said in a little notebook. He told Alex he knew nothing about what had happened to Shannan. But he said, "We're gonna help you out with the case. I used to work with the police. We're gonna call them. We'll have this whole place searched." Sure enough, later that day, helicopters were sighted above Oak Beach. They found nothing-hardly a surprise to Alex, since she had been gone for two days.

That night Alex filed a missing-persons report for Shannan in Jersey City, listing all her distinguishing marks: a tattoo of cherries on her left wrist, a scorpion tattooed on her back. He also told them Shannan was bipolar and was known to use cocaine, pot, and prescription drugs. A few days later-either the fifth or the sixth, he can't remember-Alex came back to Oak Beach a third time, this time with Michael. Shannan's sisters and Mari were supposed to meet them but backed out at the last minute, concerned that residents might call the police.

Alex and Michael walked through the neighborhood and saw Hackett, this time at the doctor's cottage on Larboard Court. Hackett took notes again, asking about Shannan's medical history, what drugs she took. Alex gave him Shannan's picture to put on a flyer. Hackett offered to give Alex and Michael a ride around the neighborhood, down roads Michael hadn't known about the night he was there. "I'm gonna keep an eye on it around here," Hackett said. "Don't worry."

Before they parted ways, Hackett told them a story. Long ago, he said, he was stranded on a boat in the water in the dark, all alone, thinking he'd die there. But then he saw a boat from far away. He shot a flare gun. The flare hit the boat, but all was well; he was rescued. Later, he said, he became a doctor who specialized in emergency medicine. His specialty was saving lives.

No question about it, Dr. Hackett liked to talk.

Mari Gilbert had trouble remembering the details. It had happened so long ago, before she understood that Shannan might be gone. The content of the phone call, as she remembered it, was very strange.

Mari heard the man say that his name was Dr. Peter Hackett, and that he lived in Oak Beach, Long Island, and that he ran a home for wayward girls. She remembered him saying that he had seen Shannan the night before-that she was incoherent, so he took her into his home rehab to help her, and the next day, a driver came and picked her up. He wanted to know if Mari had seen her since.

It was a quick call, no longer than a few minutes. In time, Mari would be questioned on every aspect of the call-when it took place, what was said, who really might have been the person calling. Alex and Michael would quibble about the timing, whether Hackett called Mari before they met him, as Mari said, or right after, the way they think it must have happened.

Hackett would deny calling Mari at all, at least at first. But Shannan's sister Sherre was there for the call, right next to her mother. She would confirm what Mari heard. And in time, there would be others-including neighbors at Oak Beach-who would come to believe that Dr. Peter Hackett knew far more about what had happened to Shannan than he ever let on.

There was no public outcry, no crush of camera crews. No one called Newsday or Channel 12, Long Island's cable news channel, to say that a woman had gone around the neighborhood banging on doors and screaming b.l.o.o.d.y murder before disappearing into the night. The police didn't come back to search Oak Beach after that first morning, either. There had been no official missing-persons report, so there was no case, just a sheepish john and an angry boyfriend.

A few days after Michael and Alex's visit, Shannan's sisters made it to Oak Beach to knock on doors and pa.s.s out flyers. Mari went with them but waited outside the gate, afraid they'd be accused of trespa.s.sing. The neighbors who spoke with them had little to offer. It seemed to Sherre that most would have preferred if they hadn't come at all.

Gus Coletti said he didn't think about the girl again at all until the middle of August, when a Suffolk County police officer knocked on his door-the same officer who had responded to the 911 calls from neighbors on the morning of May 1. The officer told Gus that on the morning when Shannan vanished, he had searched the whole neighborhood and hadn't found her. He said he'd put his hand on the hood of every SUV in the neighborhood to see if it was warm. He never saw the black SUV with the Asian driver. The officer was back, he told Gus, because a missing-persons report had been filed for Shannan in New Jersey. All this time later, there was a case. The officer wanted to know more from Gus about that morning: what Shannan was wearing, what she said, where she went.

"You know, it's been months," Gus said. "Somebody here dropped the ball."

"Well, that would be New Jersey," came the reply. This was the official line from the police: Only when the report was finally forwarded to Suffolk County did the police connect a 911 call from an upset girl in the early hours of May 1, 2010, with the reports from that same morning of a woman pounding on the doors of Oak Beach. It took that long because even after twenty-three minutes on the phone, Shannan hadn't been specific enough about her location to get help, and she hadn't been on the line long enough with the Suffolk County police for the operator to perform a trace. About three minutes into the call, Shannan said she thought she might be "near Jones Beach" and got transferred to the New York State police, because Jones Beach is their jurisdiction. No patrol car was dispatched. A police spokesperson later said the dispatcher couldn't figure out where Shannan was: "We spoke with her, the call was lost, and she never called back."

With no body, Shannan had become a run-of-the-mill missing-persons case, and the taint of prost.i.tution didn't add any momentum to a nearly nonexistent investigation. A jacket found on the ground near where Shannan was last seen was misplaced by the authorities. According to Gus, the police didn't even show any interest in Oak Beach's security video. Several cameras record who comes through the front gate at all hours; those cameras should have provided a full view of Shannan running up the Fairway and in and out of Gus's house, maybe even which direction she ran after dashing past Michael Pak's car. The video is stored on a hard drive for a month. According to Gus, the police first asked about the security video eight months after Shannan disappeared. "I told them who would have it, who was in charge of it," he said, a neighbor named Charlie Serota, a member of the a.s.sociation. By the time the police came back, Gus said, the tape had already been erased.

The neighbors who acknowledged seeing Shannan-Gus, Joe Brewer, and Barbara Brennan-appeared to have let the matter drop. Maybe they a.s.sumed they'd done their part and the police would take it from there. Maybe they thought she made it home one way or another, that she was not their problem. Maybe, when they learned that she was an escort, they cared a little less. Or maybe of all the bad luck Shannan Gilbert had that night, the worst was coming to a community that, for the better part of a century, had wanted nothing more than to be left alone.

The Suffolk County Police Department is the twelfth-largest police department in the country, with some twenty-five hundred officers serving and protecting the people of eastern Long Island. Aiding those officers is a unit of twenty-two dogs. The canine unit is composed of purebred male German shepherds imported from Eastern Europe. It takes two full-time police officers to train the dogs. Each dog develops a specialty, like a major in college: drugs, explosives, cadavers. The dogs are trained on the real thing, and when they find what they've been trained to find, they bark, bite, and scratch to get the attention of their handlers.

The one thing that an open missing-persons case with a lack of leads may be good for, as far as the police are concerned, is a training exercise for the canine unit. Officer John Mallia was a thirty-one-year veteran of the Suffolk police, a fifty-nine-year-old former private investigator who, since 2005, had called his German shepherd his partner. Blue was seven years old, and Mallia had trained him since he was a puppy. While the accepted wisdom is that most police matters are resolved within forty-eight hours, Mallia looked at Shannan's disappearance a different way. He a.s.sumed the girl was dead. Logic suggested it would be only a matter of time before someone found her. And Blue needed on-the-job training.

Over the summer, Mallia and Blue searched all of Oak Beach. Parts of the neighborhood had already grown too thick with bramble and poison ivy for a dog and his handler to walk. As summer turned to fall and the obstacles shrank, he and Blue fanned out along the southern edge of Ocean Parkway. When they found nothing, they moved across the highway to the north. Blue got scratched up, and Mallia broke out in a wicked rash.

Then, at about 2:45 P.M. on Sat.u.r.day, December 11, 2010, along the parkway near Gilgo Beach, Blue's tail started wagging. He buried his snout and dug with his forepaws, and Mallia craned to have a look at what the dog had discovered.

That was when he noticed the burlap. And the skeleton.

BOOK TWO.

I.

BODIES.

They found three more just like it, two days after the first-four sets of bones in all. Each was a full skeleton, kept whole and shrouded in burlap. Each had been placed with an odd specificity, staggered at roughly one-tenth-of-a-mile intervals along the edge of Ocean Parkway near Gilgo Beach. Right away, both the array of the bodies and the care given them seemed deliberate, precise, and methodical.

Convinced that at least one of them was Shannan, the police searched Joe Brewer's house and seized his car. Almost as soon as the find came over the police scanner, the parking lot where the Oak Beach Inn used to be became a staging area for the media, filled with trucks from all the local New York TV and radio news stations-WCBS, WABC, FOX 5, WNBC, News 12 Long Island. The cable-news networks followed later, then Dateline and 48 Hours. Surrounded by reporters, the man outed by the police as Shannan's john was defiant: "I'm innocent in this case," Brewer said, "so I have truth on my side."

Brewer claimed to have taken a polygraph, and while the police didn't describe the results or confirm right away that he had submitted to the test, they also didn't declare Brewer a suspect or person of interest. The police talked to Michael Pak, too, picking him up and driving him out to headquarters on Long Island and interrogating him for the better part of a day. Like Brewer, he would say that he pa.s.sed his polygraph. Unlike Brewer's, his name didn't leak out to the papers. The police wouldn't charge him with anything, nor would they declare him a suspect.

The people of Oak Beach felt under siege. That much wasn't unusual. But this time, the threat came from inside the gate. Where they once waved on the road, now they eyed one another as potential co-conspirators in a serial-murder case. Now it wasn't just a question of what had become of Shannan that night but of why no one in Oak Beach had cared enough to help her. Most neighbors stayed inside their homes. The one exception was Gus Coletti, who tried to distance his community from the remains found down the highway. "What guy would murder four people and dump them right outside the door here?" he said. "That would be a pretty stupid thing to do." Nothing he said made a difference. Even the most routine questions about Shannan's last night seemed to hint at some broader conspiracy. When reporters learned there was no security video for that night, they wondered why the police hadn't cared enough to recover the footage right away-and why, after a girl went screaming down the road and two neighbors dialed 911, anyone in the Oak Island Beach a.s.sociation would allow the memory on that hard drive to be wiped clean.

The makings of a media sensation weren't difficult to recognize. Four bodies on a beach. A neighborhood with secrets. A serial killer on the loose. Shannan, for her part, was the subject of a few cursory reports, most picking up on the line from her missing-persons file that mentioned bipolar disorder and drugs. All the questions in those first few days concerned her night at Brewer's. With no video evidence, reporters requested Shannan's 911 recording. When police refused to release it, no one knew that she had been bounced from jurisdiction to jurisdiction for the better part of half an hour. Shannan's family filled the vacuum. Mari told reporters that she had heard about a moment in the recording when Shannan says, "You're trying to kill me!" Sherre said the tape showed that Shannan had been trying to get away from someone.

The police weren't in a hurry to confirm anything. Suffolk Deputy Inspector Gerard McCarthy acknowledged that Shannan "intimates that she's being threatened," but he also described Shannan on the tape as "drifting in and out, intoxicated," concluding that "there's nothing to indicate she's a victim of a crime on those calls." Sherre and Mari were appalled. At least three witnesses had seen Shannan screaming and running, and the police still weren't acknowledging that there had been a crime.

Now there were four bodies to contend with, none of them identified. Off the record, the police confirmed that they were working under the a.s.sumption that all were escorts. The police and the press scoured open missing-persons cases, and within a day, on December 14, another name surfaced: Megan Waterman of Portland, Maine, last seen in June at a hotel in Hauppauge, about fifteen miles from Oak Beach. That night on CNN, Nancy Grace conducted a live remote interview with Megan's mother. In her clipped New England accent, Lorraine Waterman said the police had contacted her about the case that day and she expected they'd be coming to her for a DNA sample. Megan's mother answered barely three more questions before Grace cut her off, rhapsodizing about what Lorraine must be going through. "This is going to be one of the greatest Christmases of my life," Grace said. "And when I think about what these mothers are going through, like the mom that is joining us tonight, this could possibly be her daughter that she has loved and nurtured for all of these years, and now she's waiting to find out whether one of these skeletal remains is going to be her daughter."

Lorraine's interview was crowded out by speculation from a psychologist, Mark Hillman, author of My Therapist Is Making Me Nuts!; a former deputy medical examiner from Los Angeles, Howard Oliver, opining about the limitations of a.n.a.lyzing old bones found on a beach; legal correspondent Juan Casarez, stating, obviously, that "crime scene investigators are launching what I believe is going to be a ma.s.sive, ma.s.sive homicide investigation"; and CNN reporter Rupa Mikkilineni, live from Long Island, reporting that "all four of the bodies have very different levels of decomposition." When, in a segment from Ocean Parkway, one police officer said that Long Island might be home to a serial killer, Grace broke in.

"h.e.l.lo?" she said. "It's a serial killer! The same man killed all four women! And there's probably more!"

It's been over fifty years since Richard Dormer came to America, and his voice still hasn't lost its Irish lilt: these and there and this come out as deez and derr and diss. The Suffolk County police commissioner was born outside of Dublin and grew up in the small town of Newtown Crettyard, County Louth. Small but tough, he wanted to be a cop ever since he was eleven years old. When he was fifteen, his father died, and his only future in Ireland seemed to be working in the same coal mine that had employed his dad. He came to New York three years later, in 1958, and worked in the kitchen of a state hospital for five years, playing Gaelic football in the Bronx on the weekends, before finishing nineteenth out of more than a thousand applicants in the Suffolk County detective's exam.

Dormer moved to Long Island, married, raised a family, and walked a beat. Over the next three decades, he earned an MBA, took cla.s.ses at the FBI National Academy in Quantico, Virginia, and at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, and saw himself promoted all the way to chief of the Suffolk County police. When a new county executive pushed out the commissioner and all the chiefs with him in 1993, Dormer bided his time managing a private security company. In 2004, another new county executive, Steve Levy, brought Dormer back as commissioner. He was sixty-three, with white hair and thick gla.s.ses. Most of his peers were retired or about to be. But Dormer was thrilled, telling Newsday, "I get the chance to get back into the police department that I love." In charge at last, Dormer alienated the rank and file with budget cuts, replacing Suffolk officers with redeployed state police, insisting all the while that he was a cop's cop. He remarked on how surprised his officers seemed when he'd lumber into their patrol cars, an old coot asking to come along on their shifts. If anyone ever questioned his decisions or priorities, all he had to do was point to Suffolk County's 20 percent drop in violent crime during his tenure as the man in charge.

By the close of 2010, the end was in sight. Dormer's boss was on his way out. Steve Levy had switched parties, from Democrat to Republican, in an ultimately unsuccessful run for the governor's office, and now the district attorney, a Democrat, was investigating Levy for misuse of campaign funds. A third term as county executive didn't seem to be in the cards for Levy. His replacement was likely to bring in his or her own police commissioner. Dormer, who was turning seventy, expected to serve one final, quiet year and cap off his long career with dignity.

Which might have explained the pained look on his face when, on Thursday, December 16-three days after the second, third, and fourth bodies were found, and two days after Nancy Grace joined in the national chorus of speculation about a serial killer in his jurisdiction-he stood in front of a phalanx of news cameras on the scene at Ocean Parkway, the wind from the Atlantic Ocean tousling his short shock of white hair, and made his first statements about the case that had already hijacked his legacy, overshadowing every other memory of his career in law enforcement.

"I don't think it's a coincidence that four bodies ended up in this area," he said. In the same breath, he almost tried to wish it away: "I don't want anyone to think we have a Jack the Ripper running around Suffolk County with blood dripping from a knife." Dormer blinked. "Which might be the impression that some people would get . . . " He trailed off.