Lost Girls

by Robert Kolker

  Michael sighed. She’s faking. “Oh my God, you’re doing it just like in that movie.”

  Shannan didn’t reply. She was talking into the phone. “Long Island,” she said.

  It sounded like she was on the phone with 911. Now he was even more confused and upset. The last thing an escort would ever do was call the police. His first impulse was to run. He felt set up, cornered. First she says she’d find her own way home, and now she’s calling 911?

  That’s when Michael says he left. In the driveway, he sat in the car for a moment, collecting himself, furious. He’d dragged his ass to a strange place way the hell out on Long Island, and now he’d have nothing to show for it.

  Michael looked out at the house and spotted Brewer, standing outside on a second-floor balcony. Michael shouted up to him. “She’s still inside!”

  Brewer looked surprised. He spun around and went back inside. He must have startled Shannan, because she burst toward him and out the front door, stumbling with a thud down the patio stairs.

  She picked herself up and ran. Michael, still in the car, could barely make her out as she headed up the road. He called to her. “Shannan! Shannan!” Part of him was a little encouraged. She wants to go home finally.

  He switched on the headlights, turned the car around, and went after her. The road was narrow and poorly lit, with high bushes on the left. He couldn’t see where she’d gone. As he drove slowly, he dialed her cell, but she didn’t answer. He texted her and started shouting her name again. “Shannan! Where are you?”

  He drove through the gate at the entrance of Oak Beach and looked for her along the long access road, then doubled back through the gate, turning right on the Fairway. He got back in time to see Shannan running out of the house on the corner. He followed to where she crouched behind a boat parked not far from a neighbor’s front door.

  Michael was relieved. “Shannan, let’s go!”

  An older man, Gus Coletti, came out of the house and walked up to the SUV. “What’s going on?” he asked.

  “Nothing,” Michael said. “We’re just leaving a party.”

  “I’m calling the police,” Gus said.

  “No, don’t do that, I’m driving her home,” Michael said.

  But Coletti had distracted him long enough for him to miss which way Shannan went when she took off again, running past the front of the SUV. Michael didn’t even know there were more roads and houses beyond the drive that he’d taken to get to Brewer’s house. So he went out the gate, searching for her all over again, up the access road. He couldn’t believe he’d lost her a second time. Where else could she be?

  As he drove, he called her phone over and over, driving slowly down that long road. Could she be in one of the tall bushes on the side? Finally, he just kept going, out the drive and onto Ocean Parkway, heading back west, toward home.

  Forget it, he told himself. She couldn’t have run this far.

  The farther he got from Oak Beach, the harder he pressed the gas.

  LEXI

  The police in Portland know a lot about the New York crew now—young black men from Brooklyn driving up Route 95 to Portland’s new waterfront district, visiting the nightclubs, making some sales, then heading back home. Supply was so limited in Portland that the margin on cocaine was through the roof. Often the customers were so desperate that they didn’t notice if they were being shorted—if the gram was mostly baking powder, or if the gram was really half a gram.

  Thanks to her experience with Lili’s father, Megan knew that there was a certain type of small-town white girl who was excited by a black guy from the big city. Some of those guys would collect girls from the nightclubs like trophies. Megan did not think she was one of those girls. If anything, she collected the men. In time, some of Megan’s oldest and closest friends fell away. In their place were the New York guys. Lili’s father had come from New England, but the guys who came after him were from New York. There was Justin, and there was Woody, and there was L.L., and there was Banks. After Banks came Akeem Cruz—or Vybe, as everyone in Portland knew him—whom Megan considered the love of her life and whom others would call her pimp and abuser.

  Vybe was a year younger than Megan but tall and heavy—five-ten and over two hundred pounds. He’d grown up in Brooklyn, where his mother lived in a project near Coney Island. In June 2008, when he was eighteen and a half, he was arrested in Brooklyn and charged with reckless driving, unlawful possession of marijuana, illegal signal, failure to stay in a single lane, and criminal possession of a weapon. Rather than face those charges, he came to Portland. Everyone knew that Vybe’s crew sold cocaine, but it was hard to tell who among them was in charge and who was along for the ride, and Vybe seemed a little too chill to be a criminal mastermind. At a party, he hung to the side. He’d smoke weed and sip a 40 but never do anything harder. He was funny and talkative. Around women, he was a good listener, dispensed advice about relationships, and never demanded anything in return, the way some of his friends did. “You could ask him to do anything for you, and he would do it,” said Shareena Howard, a childhood friend of Megan’s.

  Megan’s half sister, Allie—one of the three children Lorraine gave up after losing Megan and Greg—got to know the New York crew when she reconnected with her mother’s side of the family. She recalled that Megan’s first escort gigs were arranged not by Vybe but by her previous boyfriend, Banks, who was also one of Vybe’s friends. With the money from escorting, Megan was able to move out of the Crystal Springs trailer park and into an apartment at Brick Hill, an apartment complex in South Portland. She told her grandparents she’d gotten a job dancing at Platinum Plus, a strip club located away from the center of town, a minute or two from Happy Wheels. It wasn’t true—an old friend of Megan’s who did dance there said it was a cover story—but Muriel and Doug were too cowed by Megan to question anything she did.

  Lili, then about six months old, was with Muriel and Doug most nights. Megan would come back to the trailer for a night or two of cuddling with her daughter. But at Brick Hill, Megan celebrated her independence. She threw parties, selling some of the drugs she came across, including Suboxone, a painkiller as addictive as OxyContin. With the New York guys, Megan had moved on from vodka to coke and ecstasy. “Her whole demeanor changed,” said her old friend Rachel Porter, who admittedly was one of Megan’s customers for the pills. “She turned lovey-dovey and sensitive, like an act, almost.”

  Vybe and Megan grew closer after Banks was abusive to Megan. Vybe was gentler than some of the other guys, disarming in his mellowness. At the time, it seemed that Vybe had rescued Megan from Banks, given her refuge and protection, though later on, some of Megan’s relatives would believe that everything Banks and Vybe did, they’d planned ahead of time, a fiction designed to drive Megan into Vybe’s orbit. In the well-worn narrative of the Romeo pimp, Banks was the abuser, Vybe the knight in shining armor, and Megan the easy mark: a poor single mother looking for a new life. If that was the case, even some of Megan’s closest friends were convinced that she was going into the relationship with her eyes wide open. She had been so formidable for so long, who would believe that she’d get roped into anything she didn’t want to do? Even Megan’s friend Shareena, who had seen how the New York guys played other women, said, “He couldn’t tell Megan what to do. She had her own voice, her own mind. She was strong.” Many of Megan’s friends agreed that nothing anyone said could have changed the way Megan felt about Vybe. When she fell in love, everything clicked in a way it never had before. With him, Megan saw the promise of a life without worry: security for Lili, the chance to make money, the ability to leave behind the trailer parks of the world, and most of all, what seemed like unconditional love.

  Megan left the Sherman Street apartment and split her time between the trailer in Crystal Springs and hotels in downtown Portland where she and Vybe could be together for nights at a time. When Vybe visited Crystal Springs, he was deferential, polite to a fault. He’d talk about his mother a lot, sa
ying that she kept her white carpets spotless and you always had to take your shoes off at her place. When Megan yelled at her grandparents, Vybe would shake his head and gently scold her, asking her to speak to them respectfully. He didn’t exactly hide his money. He drove a silver Cadillac with custom TVs in the back of the headrests. He’d bought the car used, off of Craigslist. “He offered me a new truck,” Doug said, “so I knew he was dealing. But of course I couldn’t prove it. And Megan had a mind of her own.”

  In the hotel, Vybe would play Madden NFL on his PlayStation 3, and Megan would do her nails. They used those hotel rooms for calls, too. Online, she was mostly Lexi (hi my name is lexi i have blond hair blue eyes great attitude . . . i love what i do ur time with me is never rushed . . . ) and sometimes Jasmine and Tiffany. Vybe would post ads for her. She assured her friend Nicci Haycock that the calls were safe—protection always; no kissing; no doing anything she didn’t want to do. “Megan wanted to please him,” Nicci said. “But she also liked the money.” Megan charged as much as $300 an hour, $150 a half hour, and $100 for 15 minutes. On a busy night, she said, she could make $1,500.

  By confiding in Nicci, whom she’d known since their days together in the Youth Center, Megan knew she was risking having her brother, Greg, find out. Greg and Nicci had been together for a while and had a child together. It was only a matter of time before Nicci let it slip. He exploded, as she expected. “I wanted to kill her myself,” Greg said. But Megan didn’t take him seriously. “To her, I was just her paranoid older brother talking shit.” When he kept pressing, Megan responded confidently, in a way that stopped the debate in its tracks. “I enjoy having sex,” she said. “Why not get paid for it?”

  In the spring of 2009, Megan and Vybe made their first trip to Long Island. She told Muriel and Lorraine that she was visiting Vybe’s family in Brooklyn. Lexi, with a photo of a recently bleached-blond Megan, posted an ad in the Suffolk County section of Craigslist on May 13:

  NEW IN TOWN—MODEL TYPE

  She posted again on June 16:

  SWEET SEXY AND SEDUCTIVE

  And again on June 23:

  CHERRY BLOSSUM BEAUTY

  this time offering to do outcalls for a little extra ($300, depending on your location). She moved back to incalls only on September 2, going by the name Tiffany:

  I’M A HOTT NEW SUPER CUTE GIRL IN TOWN

  Megan wasn’t in Portland anymore, and her Craigslist ads were drawing from a broader population; she had no good way of vetting the clientele before meeting them face-to-face. Sure enough, on October 19, Megan got stung by a Nassau County undercover who had answered one of the ads. Megan had agreed to meet him at the Extended Stay Hotel in Bethpage. They settled on a price, and she was promptly arrested and charged with prostitution. Her family never knew about it, and she never served any time.

  She got robbed twice on Long Island by two different johns. Only when they heard about the robberies did Nicci and Greg realize that Vybe, who was supposedly there to protect her, wasn’t with her every minute. “All she said about it was ‘Okay, I’m just gonna protect myself more,’ ” Nicci said. “He wouldn’t be there for dates. She’d just call him and tell him what was going on.”

  Lorraine found out about Megan and Craigslist on the checkout line of a supermarket in a neighboring town. The cashier recognized Lorraine—she once dated Greg—and told Lorraine that she’d seen a Craigslist ad with Megan’s picture. Lorraine didn’t believe it. Then she rushed home and scoured the Web. She went through hundreds of photos until she found Megan’s ad.

  Muriel and Doug didn’t believe her. Then they all convened at the home of Lorraine’s sister Ella and looked at the computer screen together. They confronted Megan the next day. She told them she was just dancing, nothing more. “That’s all I’m doing! I swear to God!”

  Muriel had no power over Megan anymore, if she ever did. And Lorraine was the last person on earth who could tell Megan what to do. Megan did deign to discuss what was happening with her mother during one of Lorraine’s rare visits to Crystal Springs. Megan said that she had been scared before the first few calls. She didn’t know what was going to happen. But then nothing happened, so she kept going. She maintained that she was just dancing, not having sex, and that Vybe was with her the whole time.

  She also told Lorraine that she and Vybe had plans for the money. They were going to get a place together. They were going to get married. Lorraine even took Megan around town to look at apartments a few times. But there were some obstacles. Megan had a criminal record, and Vybe still faced those pending drug and weapons charges in Brooklyn. They needed a place that didn’t require a background check. That required a good amount of cash.

  The two of them often stayed at a Howard Johnson that was a short walk from where Greg and Nicci lived in Westbrook. Megan brought Lili back and forth on days when Vybe was busy. Vybe didn’t like leaving the hotel when he could help it, because the police were starting to follow him, so usually, Greg or Nicci picked up Megan and Lili from the hotel and brought them down the road. They went to the playground together with their kids, or to movies or shows, or back to Happy Wheels, for old times’ sake. At the hotel, Greg got to see Vybe’s business up close. He saw which guys came and got what. He saw some coke fiends trade their possessions when they were low on cash; DVD players and cameras were stacked up in the hotel room. Once, Vybe traded a $2,500 laptop for $100 worth of coke. “He didn’t trade shit to get shit and trade it again,” Greg said. “If he had no use for it, he didn’t want it.”

  Greg and Nicci’s understanding was that Megan’s involvement in that side of Vybe’s business was limited to hiding portions of his supply at Muriel’s place in Scarborough. A trailer has any number of compartments and hiding places; Muriel and Doug never knew a thing about it. In fact, Megan did more than that. She helped Vybe deal, and she was also his customer. The irony was that Vybe was as angry as anyone that Megan was using. “I know there were times when there was a little bit missing and he wasn’t happy,” Allie said. “He wasn’t happy she was using at all.”

  That winter, an old friend of Megan’s was at her place on Boyd Street with her daughter, waiting for her boyfriend to come back from picking up some heroin. She heard a scream. She ran outside. Vybe was there, beating up a woman. Megan’s friend watched as he grabbed the woman by the hair and smashed her face against the side of the house.

  Megan’s friend screamed. When Vybe was finished, she approached the woman and saw her face. “Megan?”

  Megan was crying but then seemed shocked to see her friend.

  “She just ripped me off,” the boyfriend said.

  “I bet she smoked it all herself,” said Vybe.

  Megan’s friend called an ambulance and went with her to the hospital. Megan wouldn’t talk about what had happened. When her friend tried to ask any questions, Megan snapped, “I know what I’m doing! You’re not my mother!” She never saw Megan again.

  At Christmas, Vybe got presents for Megan and Lili. They were starting to seem more like a family. But in April 2010, Nicci got a call from Megan. She’d messed up again. She was selling some of Vybe’s coke to a neighbor in the trailer park—a guy named Wayne who was older than she was, someone who had watched her grow up—and they’d done the whole stash. Megan needed a cover story. She wanted to tell Vybe that she and Nicci had gone out drinking the night before. She needed Nicci to back her up. Nicci agreed.

  Later that day, Megan called Nicci again. She sounded upset but resigned. “He didn’t punch me, he didn’t choke me.” But he had hit her. He’d clotheslined her, she said, not clenching his fist.

  “Do you have any bruises?” Nicci asked. “Are you bleeding?”

  “No.”

  When Greg found out, he looked at Megan closely. There was no black eye, no bruises. She seemed contrite: I know I messed up. I pretty much deserved what I got. He thought about it. He understood. He thought maybe Megan would smarten up a little.

  Vybe didn’t
see her for a time. He went to stay with an old girlfriend, Ashley Carroll, who heard his side of phone calls with Megan. He’d yell, and she would talk back, and he would threaten her: “I’m gonna set your stuff on fire!” Then Ashley would hear weeping from the other side of the line, and Vybe would soothe her. “I love you. I miss you. I’m sorry. I love you. We’ll have a baby. We’ll have a home. Everything’s gonna be fine.” Ashley would keep listening as he purred into the phone: “I want you to have my baby. I love you, no one else.”

  Vybe’s hotel room had been the center of too much action—dealing, prostitution, maybe stolen goods—for the police not to take notice. In the middle of May, while Megan and Vybe were still apart, the police staged a raid. They arrested him and three others and found drugs and weapons in the room. Megan kept a vigil at her friend Shareena’s house, crying and worrying. It happened that Vybe and the other three had the resources to make bail, set at fifty thousand each. The whole matter was thrown out because the police didn’t have a warrant.

  On the day of Vybe’s release, Megan walked two miles from the top of Cumberland Avenue through the center of Portland to meet him at the jail. They embraced. On May 31, she posted an ad in Portland (hey boys its lexy im back in town). The next day, she and Vybe started packing for another trip to Long Island. Megan told practically everyone that it was going to be one of her last trips. All she needed was a little bit of money to get Liliana into day care, and a little more to get an apartment for her and Vybe.

  Megan couldn’t have been more thrilled that Vybe said he wanted a baby. Looking at Nicci’s four children, she had always said she wanted only one child, that Lili was enough. Yet when Vybe said he wanted a boy, Megan decided that was what she wanted, too.

  Hauppauge. June 5, 2010.

  On a Friday afternoon, Megan took a bus from Portland to Long Island. Vybe had left a few days earlier on his own to see his family in Brooklyn. Megan checked in alone at a Holiday Inn Express in Hauppauge, on a bare stretch of the Long Island Expressway.