She had company soon after. At eight P.M., the security camera recorded Vybe and Megan leaving the hotel together. But at eight-thirty, Megan came back alone. In her room, she made some calls. She briefly talked with Lorraine at around ten. She called Nicci at about eleven, but Nicci was too tired to talk; she told Megan she’d call the next day. Just before midnight, Megan called Muriel and said that Vybe was out with some friends and she was tired and going to bed. She asked if Lili was up. Muriel scoffed. “Um, it’s midnight,” she said. “Are you kidding?” Megan told Muriel she would call in the morning.
Sometime after midnight, Lexi posted an ad on Craigslist:
Jump Into A World Like No Other—Please no blocked calls or text messages
Vybe spoke with Megan on the phone at around 1:20 A.M. Ten minutes later, at 1:30 A.M., the security camera in the lobby of the Holiday Inn Express recorded Megan walking out through the automatic sliding door. The hotel is isolated, on a narrow service road to the highway. One witness later said Megan seemed to be walking down the service road toward a nearby convenience store—a good meeting place, perhaps, for a john who didn’t want to be seen.
Vybe called Shareena the next morning. “I’ve been to the hotel, she’s not there, her phone’s not there, nothing’s there.”
Shareena reassured him. “She’s a wild thing,” she said. “She may have just gone and got something to eat and didn’t tell you.” But Megan’s phone was going to voicemail, and they both knew Megan never turned off her phone.
Vybe was concerned enough to call Megan’s grandmother. He had a story ready: He said he and some buddies had gone out drinking, and Megan had called his phone and said she was getting something to eat and would call when she got back. When Megan never called, Vybe said, he figured she’d crashed. At six in the morning, he came by her room. The concierge wouldn’t let him in but did open the door to see if Megan was sleeping. She wasn’t there.
Vybe did call the police to say that Megan had been wearing silver hoop earrings, a silver garnet ring, and a silver necklace. What he wouldn’t do, due to his criminal record, was risk seeing them in person. For the next week, he wouldn’t tell anyone exactly where he was. Meanwhile, everyone Megan knew in Portland was talking about him: what he really knew, whether he was telling the truth. The police caught up with him as soon as he returned to Portland. A girl they all knew named Krystal Alexander—not a particularly good friend of Megan’s—accused Vybe of slashing her tires and threatening her. She had been telling people that even her boyfriend, a friend of Vybe’s named Piff, was suspicious of him.
Vybe was arrested and charged with criminal menacing with a dangerous weapon. Before he could leave on bail, the police issued a warrant for him on July 1 for failing to appear in court on an old charge of driving without a license. He got out again. The third time was the charm: On Tuesday, August 10, Vybe was arrested in a raid of his hotel room. The police were more careful than they’d been in the May raid. They had a warrant. They seized thirteen grams of crack with a reported street value of thirteen hundred dollars. There was no bail set this time. Vybe had become everyone’s prime suspect. In the eyes of Megan’s family, he was more than a dealer and a pimp. He was a human trafficker. Now that he was in jail, he wasn’t saying anything to anyone.
Megan’s disappearance didn’t do much to resolve the family feuds. Muriel and Lorraine cooperated a little at first—on a vigil at Congress Square in Portland and a spaghetti dinner at the First Congregational Church on Congress Street. Then Lorraine learned that Muriel was angling to take custody of Lili. It was Megan and Greg all over again: Muriel had decided that Lorraine wasn’t maternal enough to handle it. Instead, she wanted her oldest daughter, Liz Meserve, to share custody. Liz was happy to oblige.
Even as she was losing her granddaughter, Lorraine was being sought by the local media as the grieving mother. As long as Megan was missing, her case held attraction for cable news. In August, CNN’s Jane Velez-Mitchell show called to put Lorraine on the air (“A twenty-two-year-old mother who may have advertised herself as an escort on Craigslist has vanished. Could Megan Waterman’s disappearance be tied to her alleged online postings?”). Even as she was genuinely mourning, Lorraine was offered a chance to be something she never was in real life: a devoted mother who had a close relationship with her loving daughter. Muriel, watching from Crystal Springs, could hardly believe her eyes.
CAROLINA
Dave had a weakness for girls like Kim: the short hair, the glasses, the smile. When he first saw her behind the counter at the pizzeria in Northport, Long Island, part of him fell in love. When she spoke, he heard her Southern accent and saw his opening. “Oh, where are you from? Between your haircut, your glasses, and your accent, you’re the perfect woman.”
Kim laughed and gave him her phone number. “Why don’t you call me?” she said.
Dave didn’t, and he was too shy to come back. But a few days later, he was driving down Montauk Highway in his Acura and noticed her walking along the sidewalk. Dave summoned his nerve, flew around in a U-turn, and pulled over. “Hey, pizza girl!” He couldn’t remember her name.
Kim peered through the window at Dave. “Hey!” She remembered him.
Dave smiled. “Want a ride?”
Pretty much everything Dave Schaller did, he picked up on the fly. He graduated from high school in East Meadow, Long Island, and went for a short time to Nassau Community College—where he was better at drinking than anything else—but he liked to cook, and in his twenties, he pretty much taught himself to be a chef. Next, he got work on fishing charters and earned his captain’s license. Then Dave got into mixed martial arts and ultimate fighting. He had the build for it—six feet tall and 250 pounds, with a shock of red hair and tattoos up and down each arm. He made some money in underground fights in Manhattan basements and parking garages—$500 for a loss and as much as $4,000 for a win. He did it six times and stopped only after he broke his hands in his single loss.
He was thirty-two when he met Kim. It was the fall of 2009, and Dave had recently become a partner in a buddy’s used-car dealership in the town of Babylon, Long Island. From his job there, he had as many as four cars at a time in his driveway—an Acura TL, a Nissan Sentra, a Ford Durango, and a black GMC Denali. He was living well, even as he was living with chronic pain, a steady aching in his legs that resulted from a nerve disorder called reflex sympathetic dystrophy syndrome, or RSD. Dave had been prescribed opiates, such as OxyContin, that he didn’t like to use if he could help it. The pills that he didn’t take, he’d sell every month, making thousands of dollars from a dealer who bought everything in one bundle, quick and easy. The money helped him invest in the dealership and pay the rent on a little cottage on America Avenue in West Babylon. The house was deeper than it looked from the street, with lots of storage space. The surrounding neighborhood was Italian, middle class, nice. Dave planted sea grass and perennials on the lawn. His last relationship had shattered him, but Dave was a born romantic, always harboring a crush or looking for someone new to protect, to take care of.
Those first few months, Kim was sweet as a peach—caring and comforting, a natural listener and an even more natural talker. In time, Dave would share all his pains and heartaches, and she’d sit and take it all in, putting her head on his shoulder, saying, “Don’t worry about it.” They would spend hours together, shopping at the Roosevelt Field mall, having lunch at the Post Office Café in Babylon, walking the boardwalk at Jones Beach, going to the movies, Dave tagging along to the nail salon for a few laughs. Kim persuaded Dave to get his nails and toes done along with her, and even an eyebrow wax, and he eventually agreed, sitting there, all 250 pounds of him, next to all these fifty-year-old Long Island yentas, with all these Chinese ladies tending to him. The waxing was traumatic; he howled hilariously. He went back with Kim every two weeks.
Kim supplied Dave with a considerably sanitized version of her life story: the childhood in Wilmington and the kids—six of them now
, three in North Carolina and three here on Long Island—but none of the drugs and none of the prostitution. She told him that she was living two towns away with her boyfriend, Mike Donato, and their kids. Dave learned later that Mike’s parents were doing most, if not all, of the child care; Mike and Kim had even signed over custody. He didn’t meet Mike right away; Kim said he was in jail for passing bad checks. So the coast was clear for them to get together.
Kim made a big show of having fun in bed with Dave. If, in hindsight, something about her seemed a little too rote, with no sense of discovery or surprise, it didn’t matter to him. He was ready to do anything for her and to show her off to everyone. He brought Kim to a friend’s wedding, shopping for the dress with her beforehand. He sent presents to her kids in North Carolina—clothes, gift certificates, roller skates. He bought Kim a cell phone and signed her on to his friends-and-family plan. He would talk to Kim’s oldest daughter, Marissa, in North Carolina when Kim wouldn’t return her calls. “I wish she’d marry you so she’d have a nice guy and be normal,” Marissa would say.
But the one he got to know best on the phone was Kim’s little sister. Amber was a drunk dialer. Calling constantly from Florida, she referred to Dave as her brother-in-law. “I want to meet you,” she’d say. Kim seemed unhappy about the idea of Amber coming up to Long Island. She said her sister was persona non grata around her boyfriend’s parents, that if they ever saw Amber in town, they would suspect Kim was up to no good.
Thanks to Dave, Kim didn’t have a choice. He would listen as Amber rambled, picking up on the desperation in her voice. He heard her allude to drug deals gone bad, mounting debts, and dangerous men, and he wasn’t good at doing nothing when something needed doing. No matter how antsy Kim was about the idea, he made it his business to get Amber up to Long Island and into rehab. He sent Amber money for a plane ticket. She cashed it in and got high. He sent another one, and in February 2010, Amber arrived at MacArthur Airport in Islip. Dave brought her home.
When Kim saw her, she started tearing up. She hadn’t seen her sister in nearly three years. Amber weighed something like eighty pounds. Her arms had track marks everywhere. She smelled—her hygiene was horrible—and she was missing a lot of teeth. Dave could see past it all. He saw a mini-Kim standing there—every bit as beautiful, only more vulnerable, more in need, he thought, of his care.
Those first few weeks, while he hustled to find her a bed in a rehab, Dave didn’t know whether she would sneak away or try to steal some of his things. Dave had some Oxys and Suboxones that helped take the sting out of her withdrawal. He had one bed, a king, and he wasn’t going to make her sleep on the couch, so they all shared it. A few weeks later, after chasing down all of Amber’s documents, Dave found Amber a spot in a detox at Nassau University Medical Center in East Meadow, then a bed in a thirty-six-day rehab at St. Charles Hospital in Port Jefferson.
Dave did all this out of love for Kim. He knew she was still with Mike, and when Mike got out of jail, he understood why she didn’t come around quite as often. She’d never promised to run off with him, and he insisted that was fine with him, too. What he was less fine with was the way Kim avoided going to see her sister. Granted, she was juggling a lot: her boyfriend and her kids, her boyfriend’s parents presumably looking over her shoulder. And while Dave didn’t know the extent of it at the time, she had her own crack habit to manage. But he saw Amber every Saturday and Sunday in rehab, and Kim never visited once. Even as he made nice to Kim on the phone, Dave was fuming, screaming at her, but only to himself: What, did she think this was like having a cat?
Every new person Amber had met after her epiphany with Crystal back in Wilmington seemed like another chance to find the family she craved. Every time that chance slipped away, she was lost all over again. She had found her faith, then lost it, then found it and lost it again.
According to Amber’s father, Al, pastor Charles West of the Open Door Church in the town of Leland, outside Wilmington, had taken her in for a short while. The pastor and his daughter treated Amber like one of their own. Amber later said her time with them was the only time when the withdrawal completely left her, when she was completely free. She called them “my family.”
She was all right, Al said, as long as the pastor was alive. When he died suddenly, the church dissipated. Amber relapsed, then cleaned up long enough to be married briefly, to a man ten years her senior named Michael Wilhelm, only to divorce after another relapse. “She was a good girl, but she just had bad habits,” Al said.
In 2005, Amber’s mom, Margie, died after the ulcer that had laid her low years earlier had repeatedly ruptured. That was when Amber moved to Florida with Kim and Mike Donato, looking for a fresh start. Amber had soon drifted away from Kim and joined a Christian congregation in Dunedin, a town on the little peninsula west of Tampa on the gulf. Amber had worked her way into the church community with the same zeal she’d thrown into fitting in at Coed Confidential. She sang in the choir. She attended women’s retreats. She found a job serving food at a diner near the church and the new house where she had moved close by. She joined Celebrate Recovery, a church-affiliated group that helped people deal openly with addiction. When she talked about the rape, one woman said, “Amber, I kind of knew. I was just waiting for you to tell me.”
She married again in 2007, to a man named Don Costello. Amber told a friend that the marriage was like a promise from God—one of the rare promises that God actually kept. They had lived in Don’s apartment, a condo in a desirable building, across the street from a top-rated public school. They had joined his church, and Amber worked in the nursery there. She and Don had even tried to start a family of their own and had endured some heartbreaking setbacks—a miscarriage and adoption plans that fell through. A year or so into the marriage, a family in the church had had a child they couldn’t take care of, a baby named Gabriel. Child Protective Services got involved. While the church helped the couple sort out their problems, Amber and Don had stepped in and taken care of the boy, which made Amber deliriously happy. She had taken Gabriel to Wilmington and introduced him to her father, whom she encouraged to become more religious, too. “She just told me I needed to get closer to God,” Al said. “ ‘Just believe—you got to believe.’ ” While she was there, she had taught the boy to call Al “Granddaddy.”
The euphoria didn’t last. Everything good in Amber’s life couldn’t paper over the wound that wouldn’t heal. There was the person she longed to be and the person she was. Time and again, she’d come close to becoming that new person only to snap back.
Her marriage to Don ended in March 2009, fifteen months after it began. He didn’t like talking about it; when he did, he suggested that he had been deceived. “She was not truthful throughout our marriage,” Don said. He saw her one last time before Christmas, when she came by to pick up some holiday decorations. That same month, she was arrested at a Publix supermarket for trying to shoplift toothpaste. Amber had told the cop she worked at the Clearwater Library. She’d been ordered to appear in court in February, but by then she was long gone. She had moved to Long Island to clean herself up for good. Kim was waiting there with a new friend who promised to help Amber change her life for real.
When Amber came out of rehab, Dave learned that she’d made another new friend. Björn Brodsky—Bear to his friends—showed up at St. Charles a week after Amber. He was about as tall as Dave but rail-thin. Two of him would be as wide as Dave. Amber cracked Bear up, this itty-bitty thing, barely five feet tall, with eyes that always seemed on fire. When Bear got out a week after she did, Amber asked Dave to pick him up. Bear came home with them, and the three of them lived together in the house in West Babylon. That was when things started to change.
Like Dave, Bear spoke in a gruff Long Island accent, but he was more confident and smooth—a natural salesman, adept at making his life seem mythic and romantic and pure and righteous. Björn means bear in Swedish. He’d laugh about being called Bear. “Because no one could pronoun
ce Björn, for some reason? There’s two dots above the O, ya retard!” He told Amber and Dave that he’d grown up in Great Neck, part of a middle-class family in a fairly well-off section of Long Island’s North Shore. His father was a construction foreman, working class and Jewish, and his mother was a Tennessee Baptist. Bear embraced his Southern background—poor white-trash moonshiners. While his Great Neck friends all got brand-new Mercedes drop-tops, Bear’s first car was a 1979 Buick Skylark, $340 out of a junkyard in Tennessee.
Dave liked Bear. Having him around the house, he thought, was better than letting Amber go off somewhere on her own, unsupervised. For a while, Dave could make a pretty good case to himself that he was taking in a bunch of screwups and fixing them all. As they grew closer, Dave learned that in the year before, Bear had successfully torpedoed his entire life, spending eight months in jail for breaking and entering—roped in by an ex-friend, he insisted—and that his longtime girlfriend had a baby boy while he was away. The girlfriend was not into drugs. When Bear got out of jail, he saw the baby and then went right back to using. At the St. Charles rehab, Bear was hoping to straighten out so he could be part of his son’s life. Then he met Amber.
Both Dave and Bear got to know Amber better, too. They saw how determined she was to be liked and how much she craved intimacy. Amber always needed to be held by Bear, to cuddle, to have some sort of physical contact. She was embarrassed by her teeth—it seemed to Dave that more than half were gone—but as brash and sexually open as she’d always been. When she coyly joked about what she called her “million-dollar pussy,” Dave and Bear saw through the posturing. They saw how nearly everything about Amber could be traced back to a deep, unbridled need to be loved, including how territorial she became. She hated hearing that Bear had a baby son with another woman, and she hated it more when he would cut away for the day to see them. She didn’t talk much about her spiritual life, but she did dwell on her failed marriages, weeping about her failed quest for a child of her own.
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