The Last Stone Read online

  Three months had elapsed since their last visit. Lloyd again sat slumped in his orange jumpsuit, hands cuffed and chained in his lap. He grunted sullenly.

  The detective set a big cup of coffee on the table before him. “It was kind of a mess getting over here; I don’t know how warm that is.”

  Lloyd didn’t drink it.

  “It has been a couple of weeks because we had to run down all that stuff you told us.”

  Lloyd squinted at him.

  “And it’s good. It’s good for both of us. There’s some things we want to clear up, and I think now we’re closer with you in being together on this thing.”

  It wasn’t true, and Lloyd was not buying it. As they again went through the ritual of legal consent, he was more than usually suspicious. He pointed to a paragraph, one he had seen several times now, which outlined the steps that would follow his being charged with a crime. In the past Dave had always made a point of x-ing that out to emphasize that they were not planning to charge him.

  “You didn’t cross it out like you did the last time,” Lloyd said.

  “Oh shit. We can cross it out.”

  “I’m just sayin’.”

  Lloyd was still angry. He was smarting over the seizure of his papers. To justify it, prison authorities had alleged that he had broken their rules, a charge which appeared to have been trumped up.

  “What’s the deal [with the seizure]?” he asked.

  “That’s a good place to start, because I’m sure in your mind—”

  Lloyd laughed. How else would anyone take it? The seizure of his property and search of his cell meant that he was a target.

  “I mean, I can totally see it from your perspective,” said Dave. “It looks bad. But look at it from this perspective. If we’re going to try and build anything against you … How long have we known each other? Damn near over a year, right?”

  “Since October of last year.”

  Lloyd knew exactly. He was not in the mood to be snowed. He complained bitterly about “the charge that was put on me,” referring to the justification on the search warrant, which claimed that he had abused his letter-writing privileges. He said it was a “fabrication,” a “lie,” and “threatening.”

  “I’ll explain it to you,” said Dave. “When we left here, you said, ‘Hey, you need to talk to my cousin.’ So we went out and explored the cousin [Teddy], we explored the family. The family is not in your corner.”

  “Yeah, I know they’re not.”

  “The family is against you, and they’re lying to us,” said Dave. He said that Welch family members had told them that there was relevant information in Lloyd’s letters. That’s why they had been seized.

  “There ain’t nothing in it,” Lloyd said.

  “There’s nothing there,” Dave agreed. “Which is good. It’s good for both of us.”

  Dave was trying to find his footing, to cut through Lloyd’s sourness and skepticism. He decided to be straight with him about Teddy. The accusation didn’t add up. He also pointed out that Lloyd’s claim to have traveled to and from the mall with Helen on a bus also could not be true, because there had been no such bus service in 1975.

  “It’s time for you to kick back and say, ‘Look, I got a vested interest in myself,’” Dave reasoned. “You’ve got a vested interest in not getting any more time.”

  He still viewed Lloyd sympathetically, he said, but it was becoming a minority view. Dave was Lloyd’s resolute defender. He had figured something out, he said. It was one thing to react with disgust to a fifty-seven-year-old man’s interest in girls aged twelve and ten, but if Lloyd had been attracted to girls that age in 1975, it was no big deal.

  “You were nineteen! [He had actually been eighteen.] Any nineteen-year-old kid, there’s nothing wrong there. And that’s the thing. You gotta say, ‘Okay, wait a minute now, he wasn’t fifty-seven doing this, he was nineteen.’ Any nineteen-year-old kid that went to a mall, the whole purpose of going to a mall back then when you were a kid was to hang out, to find girls and find people to party with. That was it.”

  “But I already had a lot of people to party with,” said Lloyd. “You already know that.”

  “Right. But it’s always fun to have different people.”

  “And I was involved with Helen.”

  “All right.”

  “I was.”

  Dave altered course. Noting again Lloyd’s youth, he suggested that he might have been roped into the crime by his family.

  “You’ve got a vested interest in protecting your family, but they’re not protecting you,” he said. “I’ve been here to see you more than your entire family, which is sad.”

  Lloyd shrugged his shoulders. This was true.

  Dave got him talking along these lines. He asked about Lloyd’s father, Lee. “He liked girls and boys. It didn’t matter, right?”

  “Who, my dad?”

  “Right.”

  “Yeah.”

  “And that seems to be the running theory about your uncles, too. It didn’t matter.”

  Lloyd nodded emphatically. He said, “Now, me, I like women.”

  He was warming to the conversation again. It was hard to overestimate the desire of a man living in isolation to talk. After his initial petulance, he began to relax. He peeled the lid off the coffee Dave had brought in and took a sip. The detective persuaded the guards to come in and remove both Lloyd’s chains and his handcuffs, a first. Then he commiserated with Lloyd about his eyes, which were puffy and red.

  “They keep saying I have hay fever,” said Lloyd. “Or some kind of allergy. I keep telling them, I’m fifty-seven years old. I’ve never had an allergy in my life. I’ve never had hay fever.”

  “Could it be a detergent they clean that shit with?” Dave suggested, gesturing toward his bright orange prison uniform.

  Dave returned to Lloyd’s relatives. So far the detectives had talked to Dick, Pat, and Teddy.

  “Every time that you sit down and talk, we learn a little bit more about your family.”

  Lloyd sighed and shook his head sadly.

  “And then you talk to them and you find out about all the craziness and weird activities that they’ve been doing, and all the lying that they’ve been doing, you have to take a step back and say, ‘Wait a minute, there’s more to this story.’ Why you are not telling us what the hell happened, I don’t know. They trashed the shit out of you.”

  “Oh, I’m sure they did. ‘He’s a sex offender. He’s in jail.’”

  “Right! ‘Look at him.’”

  “Yeah, ‘Look at him and look at all he’s done.’”

  “I’m trying to figure out when you are going to kick back and say, ‘I’m in this for myself,’ and say, ‘Look, this is what happened.’ This is where I step in and say, ‘Wait a minute!’” Dave banged the table for emphasis. “‘Look at what he’s done.’ So what? Has he ever done anything to a stranger? His DNA’s in the system, right? It has been there since 2003. That’s eleven years. And have you caught any additional charges?”

  Lloyd shook his head no.

  “Your background is not the best because you’re sitting here, but we can’t change that.”

  “Right.”

  “The only thing we can do is, you do the time and get out. How many years you got left in you, you do the right thing?”

  “This Friday it will be eighteen years for me being incarcerated. Seventeen years ago, I told myself that I was gonna turn around and bring myself to the Lord, and I was gonna change my life and everything like that, and if I ever get a chance to get out, that I was gonna help people, and I meant it. I still mean it, even though I have all this bitterness in me of what’s going on here about this whole incident thing with the two girls. I didn’t do it. I would never walk up and take two strangers. How am I going to get them out of a mall to begin with? You know what I’m saying?”

  “Right. And I think that’s the thing we need to clear up, because I think there was a casual nineteen-y
ear-old male who was interested, and I think after the party and whatever happened that day, I think someone else got involved, and I think you said, ‘That’s not what they’re here for,’ and I think you decided, ‘You do what you need to do, and I’m gone.’ So, my thing here today is to pull that shit out of you.”

  Lloyd said he had nothing more to tell. “Think about this,” he explained. “Every crime I’ve ever done has been to somebody I know. Never been to a stranger. The two sexual charges that I have has been with the girls that have lived in my own house. Never been outside of my house or anything like that or doing any sexual things to anybody.”

  “Why would the family paint you to be this horrible person when to me, looking at it from the outside, you’re damn near normal,” said Dave. “Is that why they don’t like you? They’re just not telling the truth about what happened. They know.”

  “If you find out what happened, as to why they pushed me away, I sure would like to know.”

  “There’s something there,” said Dave.

  “But this ain’t about me telling you about Teddy at the mall that day. He was there that day, you know? I don’t care what he says, he was there. Him and some other person was there. I don’t even know who that person was.”

  Lloyd was still pushing his allegation about Teddy and Kraisel. The squad knew Kraisel had not been involved, but what about Lloyd’s father and uncles?

  Dave said, “Is it at all likely that those two girls, however they went away from that mall, whether it was willing, whether it was drugged, whether it was somebody forced them, however they went away from that mall, and I’d like to think that it was willing—the reason is because it’s a lot of people [watching]. It was a holiday week and in the middle of the day. If somebody had forced them away, somebody had to see or hear.”

  “That’s what I’ve been saying.”

  “But if they went with another twelve-year-old, and another guy who was, say, just nineteen,” it wouldn’t have attracted as much notice, Dave hypothesized. “And then they went to wherever and somebody else got involved, and the shit went sideways. And at that point you and Teddy went like this,” he put his hands together on the desk and slid them wide apart. “And the person responsible for doing harm to those two little girls—”

  Lloyd nodded. “I see what you’re saying.”

  “And as hard as it might be, I think you are gonna have to dig down inside and say, ‘You know what? It’s time for me to stop. People are painting me as a monster because of my background.’ And you’re still dug in, saying, ‘Man, if I say some shit like that, I’m gonna be stuck here forever.’ That’s not what we’re trying to do.”

  One of Dave’s methods was to “admit” that he wasn’t revealing all that he knew. He pretended that Lloyd’s relatives had fed them all sorts of damaging things about Lloyd. “I’m not giving it all to you,” he said, “because if you give it back to me, then I know it’s the truth,” he said.

  “Well, see, that’s the thing. I can’t give you something that I don’t have. And I’m not going to sit here and say I have something that I don’t have, you know? I’ve been racking my brain. Trust me.”

  THE DRIVER

  Lloyd had invoked his drugged-addled brain so often it no longer even registered. His memory was fine. The problem was to convince him that it was in his best interest to reveal what he knew, even though it manifestly was not.

  Dave took a creative leap. He supposed Lloyd had been at the mall with Teddy. His story of riding there with Helen on a bus had been shown to be false. If he and Teddy had made the trip together, who drove them? Teddy was too young to drive, and Lloyd didn’t have a car. And if someone had driven them there, that same person most likely had brought them back, which meant that this person, an adult, had helped them kidnap the girls. Dave now pretended he knew who the driver was. By not naming him, he said, Lloyd was hurting himself. He was obstructing justice. He was protecting someone guiltier than himself. As Lloyd’s buddy, his champion, Dave urged him to help himself.

  “I can’t get you to come around and say, ‘Look, man, this is what happened,’” said the detective. “If you truly had nothing to do with them disappearing, then you need to say what the fuck happened!”—banging the desk again—“Because, it changes. All of the sudden you’re this huge person that everybody has painted. You’re wearing orange. They put you in solitary. To a person that’s simply a witness. And we need to unfuck this thing. If it is coming around and saying, ‘Look, I’m gonna have to tell on my family,’ then that’s what you fucking need to do. You can’t keep eating this shit over and over and over again!”

  “But I’ve already said Teddy,” Lloyd protested.

  “Who else? Teddy was twelve [he was actually eleven]. He couldn’t drive a car.”

  “I know he couldn’t drive a car. I don’t know who the other person was. I told you that.”

  “But I need you to tell me who it is.”

  “His fuckin’ dad. That’s who I believe it was.”

  “It wasn’t your dad?”

  “No. Not my dad, I said his. I don’t know who the other person was. That’s what I’m trying to tell you. I don’t know the person’s name. If I knew the person’s name, I’d be happy to say his name.”

  “You’re in a car with your uncle, and you didn’t know who was driving?”

  Lloyd was silent.

  “You need to take that step,” said Dave.

  “Let me ask you this, hypothetical,” said Lloyd. “If I do say who it was, what’s going to happen to me?”

  This was an emerging pattern. Whenever Lloyd was about to give in, he asked this question, and Dave expertly ducked it. He said, “That’s a tough question, and the reason I tell you that is because I don’t know what role you played in it.”

  “No,” said Lloyd. “I was gone. I left. There’s no ifs, ands, or buts about it. I left, and if you ever find those bodies, you’ll never find my DNA on them.”

  “Did you do anything wrong?”

  “Nope.”

  “Then what the hell would we charge you with?”

  “I’m the one that’s in jail.”

  “You’re a witness! You’re in jail for something different. I’ve never worked harder on this fucking job, after I left you, trying to corroborate the things that you’ve told me when we sit in this room, and every single time I come back, have I ever presented you with a charge?”

  Lloyd shook his head no.

  “Have I ever said, Lloyd, it’s time for me to sit down and charge you?”

  “No.”

  “Every time I sit down and talk to you, we get a little closer to pushing you away from this thing.” The opposite was true. “So you have answered your own question. If you tell me, then my job is to go back out there and figure it out. And if you tell me who did it—which I already know—then it’s my job to take what you’ve told me and turn it into something to make it work, whether it be charging, whether it be to find them bodies, to make it actually work. There’s a reason you told us Teddy. It’s time, Lloyd.”

  “What if I tell you who the other person is, and you go and talk to him, and all of a sudden it’s, ‘No, I didn’t have anything to do with it’?”

  “We’ve got other things. We’ve already talked to that person. The person’s an asshole.”

  “I’ve said his name a few times in here, haven’t I?” Lloyd asked.

  “Yeah … he’s an asshole.”

  “Yeah. Uncle Dickie.”

  “Right.”

  All of this Dave had orchestrated. He had taken Lloyd’s own story and thought it through more carefully. Neither Lloyd nor Teddy would have had a car. So somebody else had to have been the driver. Dave’s hunch was Dick, so he had led Lloyd into naming him. It was an iffy interrogation practice, but, technically, he had gotten Lloyd to volunteer Dick’s name.

  “Tell me what happened that night,” said Dave.

  “All I know is that we were at the mall that day, an
d the girl came up to me and said, ‘Take a picture,’ and I said, ‘If I had a camera, I would.’ Teddy got talking to these two girls. I don’t know where he came out of. We were actually walking around. Uncle Dick stayed in the car. He [Teddy] got ’em to go outside. We all left. We did go back to the house. I had him drop me off at the store there on Route 1, right where the bridge was at. There used to be a little store. Helen had asked me to pick up something for her, and I told her I’d get it on the way back. They dropped me off. They left. That was the last time I saw the four of them that day, and I went back to the house [Lee’s]. Me and Helen sat there. We ate dinner and stuff. We talked. That was the last I seen those girls was when they dropped me off at the store.”

  “Fill in the blanks for me, because we’ve come a long way,” said Dave. What Lloyd had done was substitute his uncle Dick for Leonard Kraisel. Dave wanted a narrative that would flesh out this shift. “And you are now a witness. I’m not saying that I am going to put you up on the stand and [i.e., to] testify against your uncle and Teddy, but there’s some things that we need to clean up. Were they [Dick and Pat] babysitting Teddy that day?”

  “Yeah. I don’t know if you’d even call it babysitting or what. He was stayin’ there. I mean, he was with him.”

  Lloyd described the car that had driven the three of them to the mall, an old Ford station wagon. He couldn’t remember the color.

  “Y’all went up to the mall. Ted gets these … recruits these two girls. Tell me what happens then.”

  “We got in the car.”

  “Were they willing to go?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What was the conversation like?”

  “One girl sat up in the front with Teddy. I sat in the back with one of them.”

  “Do you remember which one?”

  “No, I don’t. I don’t honestly. They were talking, and I didn’t really even say anything to the girl. I asked her, ‘What y’all doing?’ and they said they were going to party, and I had them drop me off at the store. And that was the last that I saw them.”

  Lloyd admitted he’d been scoping out preteen girls in the mall. He was high, he said. In the days after they took the girls, he said his uncle Dick had turned against him.