PROLOGUE
To most travelers, the barrier islands of Long Island are just a featureless stretch between Jones Beach and Fire Island—a narrow strip of marsh and dune, bramble and beach, where the grassy waters of South Oyster Bay meet the waves of the Atlantic Ocean. The main artery of the barrier islands, Ocean Parkway, is long and straight and often empty at night—a drag racer’s dream. A driver can see little more than the beach heather or bayberry tangled thick and high on the shoulders of the highway. Fifteen miles of darkness surrounds passing vehicles like a tunnel, and the headlights of other cars are visible for miles down the straightaway. You can tell when you’re alone.
Late on a warm night in May 2010, just after one A.M., Michael Pak weaved his black Ford Explorer around the traffic circle surrounding the elegant brick spire marking Jones Beach and shot out the other side on Ocean Parkway. From Manhattan, he was heading east on the straightaway, passing right by the best-kept secret of the barrier islands, Gilgo Beach: a surfing mecca in the sixties, until erosion ruined the waves. Just before he reached the Fire Island turnoff, his GPS guided him off Ocean Parkway and down an unlit, unmarked side access road. The sign on the turnoff read OAK BEACH. In the backseat sat a young woman with chestnut hair streaked blond. Her name was Shannan Gilbert.
They moved slowly now in the dark. The narrow road was overgrown with Virginia creeper and shining sumac and poison ivy. Outside, the air was spongy and salty, and the hum of the car was drowned in the whir of insects. Through some pine trees on the left, they both could see the rushing glow of cars speeding by on the highway. Through the brush on the right were the lights of a house—the only indication that anyone lived at the end of the road.
After half a mile, Michael pulled up to a white gatehouse decorated with a wooden model of a lighthouse and, a few yards beyond the gate, a blue wooden sign that read OAK ISLAND BEACH ASSOCIATION EST. 1896 in the kind of gold cursive lettering you might find on the side of a sloop. Where the gatehouse once had an attendant was now a metal box with a keypad. Michael didn’t know the code. Neither did Shannan. Michael dialed a number on his phone and, a moment later, another SUV—this one white—approached the gate from the other side.
The driver’s door opened. Out stepped a middle-aged man with a potbelly and a wavy mess of dark hair. The man waved, jogged a few feet up to the gatehouse, and punched in four digits, smiling over at them.
The gate swung up. The Explorer rolled through, and Michael waited for the man to get back in his car before following him down a path he hadn’t seen, back toward the house with the light.
Gus Coletti is shaving. He is eighty-six years old, a grandparent, long retired. He and his wife, Laura, are up early in their small wood-frame house in Oak Beach to head upstate to a car show. He hears pounding on his front door. He opens up and sees a girl with chestnut hair. In her hand is a cell phone.
The girl is shrieking. The only word Gus can make out is “help.” Those who have heard the 911 recording say it sounds as if Gus never let her inside, though he will later insist that he did. In any case, all it takes to send her running away is Gus saying he’s going to call the police.
The girl trips down the porch stairs. Gus heads outside, staying on the porch, watching as the girl beats on a few more doors, then finds a hiding place behind the small boat just outside his house. Both he and the girl see the lights of a truck coming down the Fairway toward them. When the car stops, he can see it more clearly—a black Ford Explorer with a young Asian driver.