law enforcement source said she had arranged a date without Cruz's knowledge and met the man in his car.

At 11 a.m. on June 6, Cruz called Benner, asking about Waterman's whereabouts.

"She was supposed to be with you?" Benner said she responded. "Where is Megan?"

Money fueled drug habit

Amber Costello's rule about staying out of a john's car came after a brutal lesson.

Her roommate Schaller, who helped her with clients, said he could recall her getting into a man's car only once -- after their session was over and he offered her a ride to a convenience store.

"She called me from the side of the Southern State Parkway. Her head was bleeding," Schaller recalled. "He had punched her three times in the face and left her on the side ofthe road."

Costello told her boyfriend, Bjorn Brodsky, 26, that sex work had been part of her life since she was 17. She was also a heroin addict, according to Schaller, Brodsky and her relatives.

A Wilmington, N.C., native, Costello did not graduate high school, married and divorced twice and bounced around jobs in North Carolina and Florida before moving to New York in late 2009. Schaller, a friend of Costello's sister Kimberly Overstreet and then a commercial fisherman, said he paid for her plane ticket.

She attended a 28-day rehab program at St. Charles Hospital in Port Jefferson, where Brodsky said he met her. Both of them relapsed into drug use by the following spring.

Costello bought a prepaid cellphone and uploaded a Craigslist post advertising herself as a private dancer