The Last Stone Read online

  “But that’s the whole thing,” Lloyd protested. “They didn’t say anything to me.”

  “Did they look scared? We’re talking about a ten- and twelve-year-old girl.”

  But Lloyd stuck with it. “I mean, back then, who was scared? It was all free love and partying and shit like that. Those girls were never tied up. I didn’t see them tied up, so I can’t say if they were tied up. And not one of them said, ‘Hey, I want to go home,’ ‘Hey, this is Easter weekend, you going to let us go? Help us?’ Anything. They didn’t say nothing. They didn’t talk to me at all, you know. He showed me where those girls were at and just said ‘babysit them.’” He said Helen would have done something if she thought the girls were being abused.

  This, Dave reiterated, was inconceivable. Kate had been crying when she left the mall, days earlier. She would have been frantic. He talked about the childlike drawings and writings found in the girls’ rooms and schoolwork.

  “They were kids, man. They were coloring! This wasn’t two girls who were going to smoke and drink. And now you’re talking about being in a stranger’s house for five days? And who knows how many people have run through [raped] them? And it’s Easter Sunday and one of their birthdays?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “How can—”

  “I didn’t know it was her birthday.”

  “It doesn’t add up.”

  “I understand that. You asked me earlier if one of the girls looked like they were drugged. And I told you the older one looked like she was drugged. I believe both of them was drugged.” He offered a theory. He said he thought Pat was a nurse—she wasn’t—and that would have given her access to needles and drugs. Lloyd was flailing now. He floated the idea that the girls may have been running away from home because their father was abusing them. Dave said these explanations were not going to help him.

  “You understand completely now that we need to try to make something work,” the detective said. “And if we don’t, then we’re left with a pile of shit. Both of us are.”

  Lloyd would not alter his story.

  “Why would you guys hitchhike and then have them follow you down in a car?” Dave asked.

  “Why? I didn’t even know they were coming down. I didn’t have a car.”

  “Did you ride with them?”

  “We actually hitchhiked. Me and Helen hitchhiked out of there.”

  “How are we going to explain what Connie says and what Henry says?”

  “They’re lying. They are totally lying. We did not come down there in a car.”

  Lloyd looked beaten. He said he was resigned to taking all the blame, unfairly.

  “How can we undo it?” asked Dave. “How can we switch it back?”

  “I mean, I could sit here and say, ‘Hey, I saw Dick chop them up.’ I’d be lying. I could say, ‘Hey, I knew they were taking them down to Virginia.’ I’d be lying. You see what I’m saying?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “I can only admit to what I know. I can’t fabricate that I saw him chop them up. I can’t fabricate that I knew they were in a car and that he was just going to take them down. I can’t. I didn’t drive down in no car. And I’ll put a stack of Bibles, anything you want. I did not drive down in any car with any bags in it and throw anything on a fire. That was—no.”

  The more adamant Lloyd grew protesting his truthfulness, the closer he was to admitting a lie. It was as if he built a wall around a falsehood, and when facts started pressing in, he pushed back harder and harder until he could resist no longer. Then the wall completely collapsed. They were getting close to that point again.

  Dave continued pretending that he was Lloyd’s ally. He believed Lloyd. He pleaded for some detail, one demonstrable fact, that would prove Lloyd’s story.

  “I have a very strong idea where those girls were killed at, very strong idea,” said Lloyd. He described a bridge near Dick’s house, a span over the Anacostia River. “You know where the house used to be at?”

  “What house?”

  “Dickie’s house.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “You know where the bridge is? On Buchanan Street, the bridge that goes across? You know the little river than runs down there?”

  “Right.”

  He said Dick had a spot beneath that bridge where he liked to hang out.

  “I’m pretty sure that’s where they were killed,” he said. “That would probably be the logical place for him to take them, because it’s under a bridge and it’s right there by the water. There should be some family members to tell you that he used to go down and do a bit of fishing there. I mean, he was down there quite a bit. Nine times out of ten that’s where I’d say he took them. I’d say he drugged them and took them there, and that’s where he did what he had to do.”

  The bridge, Lloyd said, would have provided him with cover. “Nobody would even know you were there. And if you did it at nighttime, nobody would see you.”

  “Why would you struggle with telling me that?” Dave asked.

  “Because even though I know they’re turning against me, I still have some kind of love for parts of my family. I don’t like turning against people. I don’t like being considered a snitch.” This despite the fact that he had months ago introduced his cousin and his uncle as the girls’ kidnappers and killers.

  “Let me put it to you this way,” said Dave. “Do you know that’s what happened? Because if you’re saying it hypothetically, that’s not a snitch. That’s just your opinion on it.”

  “Yeah. I mean—”

  “I mean, let’s just be fucking real.”

  “Do I know for real that it happened there?”

  “Yeah. I mean, you just said, ‘Fuck it.’ You were holding that as a trump card. I mean, to me, you know for sure.”

  Lloyd stammered. “Come on, man. We’ve been—this is too much.”

  “It’s time,” Dave demanded.

  “Yeah. I do know that that’s where they were killed at,” said Lloyd. “Did I drive them down there? No.”

  Lloyd said that the bridge and river were his uncle’s “comfort area,” but then he backtracked again. He said he could be only “ninety percent” sure. He was now worried he had said too much.

  “I don’t think you got the death penalty in Maryland. I don’t know.”

  “No.”

  “Or in Virginia. I don’t know.”

  “They do in Virginia.”

  “Oh fuck. Oh fuck. I’m fucked now. I’m dead.”

  Lloyd now said that he saw Dick leave with the girls in a car heading toward the river and the bridge. He and Helen were clearing out, as Dick had suggested, and that was what he saw. Something bad happened under that bridge. “I don’t know what, because we kept walking. I didn’t turn around and look.”

  THAT IS WHAT IT IS

  Three and a half hours into the session, Mark and Katie took over, pressing home to Lloyd how hard Dave was working on his behalf.

  True to form, Mark zeroed in on the absurdities in Lloyd’s story. While there were parts of it they all believed, the rest would fall with one blow. No one would believe—he didn’t believe—that the girls were trippy and calm days after being kidnapped.

  “I didn’t say I kidnapped them.”

  “You said that.”

  “Yeah, you did,” said Katie.

  “No, I did not. I said I walked out of the mall with them. I never kidnapped them. I never forced them. I never said ‘kidnapped.’”

  “Well, whether you used the word or not, it’s po-TAY-to, po-TAH-to, it doesn’t make any difference,” said Katie.

  “I said I walked out of the mall with them. I didn’t force them out of the mall. I asked them if they wanted to party and get high.”

  “But the fact of the matter is, whatever the circumstances of their leaving with you, they never came home.”

  “Right,” said Lloyd.

  “So you are responsible for whatever happened to them, in the eyes of the law.”

&n
bsp; “‘In the eyes of the law?’ Yeah, I guess so.”

  “See what I’m saying?” asked Mark.

  Lloyd said he understood. Mark walked him through the rest. He had seen one of the girls being raped. He knew that was wrong. He did nothing. And then he turned up at the mountain at the same time as the girls, both dead, or one dead and one alive. “So at no point did you do anything to help them or try to help them, you know what I mean?”

  “That’s true.”

  “These are the things that a reasonable body of people are going to be thinking. That is what it is. There’s no changing that. But that leaves so much unanswered.”

  Lloyd allowed that he should have done something.

  “At that point in time I didn’t really think anything was going to happen to those girls,” he said, as if abducting, raping, and feeding drugs to a ten-year-old and a twelve-year-old wasn’t, in itself, anything. “Like I told Dave, I think Dick panicked when I ended up going back to the mall, and things went sour. I think in reality he wanted to party and he found a couple of girls that he partied with, you know?”

  Katie said that if he didn’t drop his pose of complete innocence, his family was going to bury him.

  “I can tell you that there’s a list of people in your family that I hate, and you’re very low on that list. We like you. I can tell you who I hate, that I hope burn in hell I hate them so much.”

  “Pat,” Lloyd interjected, grinning.

  “They’re evil, awful people. Did you say Pat? She’s number one. That’s funny that you say that, because she’s number one. She’s a sickening person.” Lloyd leaned forward with mirth, his arms folded across his chest. “But the reason we keep coming back to you is because, number one, you know stuff, but also because we think you have redeeming qualities, and we think you are going to eventually tell us the truth. You’re a smart guy. You’re one of the smartest people I’ve met.” Lloyd smiled and ducked his head shyly; he was eating this up. “You are! You are always ten steps ahead of us. And it may be because you have a lot of time on your hands to be ten steps ahead.”

  “I watch a lot of Criminal Minds,” he said, referring to the popular TV series about a team of FBI criminal profilers, then quickly added, “I’m just joking.”

  “Maybe if I watched it I could figure out how to crack you,” Katie said, “but let’s call a spade a spade. You’ve got more, and we’re playing a little game trying to figure out what we need to do to get more from you. It’s part of the game that we play with you. You know it. You’ve admitted it before. For whatever reason you are still holding stuff back. And it’s self-preservation. And I would probably do the same thing.”

  Katie went on to describe how she saw the game. Dave, she said, “who really believes in you,” would report what Lloyd had said to the rest of the squad. “And my bullshit meter goes off. We don’t have the same relationship with you that Dave has.” She told Lloyd that after their last meeting, she suspected that he had gone back to his cell and worried about how much he had revealed. “And now you’re trying to draw back,” she said, “but the problem is that there’s things that have happened that you can’t take back. And it makes Dave look like a complete asshole if he’s sticking up for you.”

  “I told Dave earlier—didn’t he tell y’all?—that Dickie’s the one who killed them. He didn’t tell you that?”

  “No,” Katie lied. “I never even saw Dave.”

  Lloyd retold his story about Dick taking the girls down toward the bridge as he and Helen left to hitchhike to Virginia. “They [Sheila and Kate] looked like they were still drugged up pretty good, because you could look at them. They were just, like, sitting there, you know?”

  “Did they look alive?” Katie asked.

  “I mean, the girl’s head moved, so I figured he was taking them home at the time.”

  Sometimes the things Lloyd said were so incredible they took Katie’s breath away.

  “So this man has abducted them from the mall, had sex, drugged them up, and now he’s, like, ‘Oh, Happy Easter, I’m going to take them home’?” she said. “That’s absurd.”

  “I thought he was going to drop them off somewhere. I mean, I’m a stupid kid back then.”

  “You’re far from stupid now. There’s no way you were that stupid then.”

  Lloyd was not changing his story.

  “I try to tell you when you are not making sense,” said Mark. “You’ve got to help us! That leaves our efforts today to try to better your situation floundering.”

  “We feel like you know more; you are not helping yourself,” said Katie. She told him that his use of the word babysit was turning her stomach. The girls had ended up raped, murdered, butchered, burned. “They sure as hell weren’t being babysat. They were being held against their will.”

  “Okay.”

  Again, Lloyd insisted the girls seemed happy. He thought he was helping them run away from home.

  “So you thought that after you saw a drugged girl being raped. You can’t possibly convince me that you thought that.”

  “I did.”

  During the time he babysat the girls, Katie asked, uttering the word with scorn, “What were the instructions you were given?”

  Lloyd nodded and waved his hand and shouted, “NOW you ask the question you’ve been waiting to ask! Right?”

  “That actually just popped into my head,” said Katie, truthfully.

  “It’s the question that I’ve been waiting for,” said Lloyd.

  This was nonsense. Katie had suggested to him that he was playing games with them, and Lloyd liked that idea. It made him seem smart. So now he pretended, poorly, to be engaging in gamesmanship. The whole thing was just … off. It made you wonder how self-aware Lloyd really was. His answer to Katie’s question was that he and Helen were told to keep an eye on the girls. This answer told them nothing of consequence.

  “So, you’re not going to offer anything that we don’t ask,” said Katie. “If you look up welch in the dictionary, it says ‘people who will not offer up anything unless you ask.’”

  “Really?”

  “Yes,” said Katie. She was joking, but Lloyd didn’t get it. “I actually wrote Mr. Webster a letter and asked him to put it in the dictionary. So, unless we ask you the right question, you are not going to give it to us?”

  Lloyd shrugged his shoulders.

  “Okay, that’s fair. That’s cool,” said Katie.

  “Well, some answers I’ll give you, but some I won’t, because I’m not really trying to get charged with anything. I’m not trying to stay in jail for the rest of my life for something I didn’t do.”

  The back-and-forth continued for another hour. Then came the day’s final act, the one they had been setting up. Three Virginia detectives came in—Mayhew, Wilks, and Willis—all business.

  Mayhew introduced himself.

  “I’m going to be straight with you, buddy. We just went over this stuff with Dave and Mark and Katie. I know you’ve been talking to them all day. I know you’re tired. But we’re here for one thing. We’re investigating the deaths of the two Lyon sisters. And that’s two sisters, not just one. That’s two cases. And to be straight up and forward with you, buddy, everyone we’ve talked to in your family, and we’ve talked to everyone, believe me. We know a lot, and we know you still know a lot. Now, where we’re going to start this at is, we know we’ve got you the day they were abducted, in between babysitting them, and at the end where the bodies are at. Do you understand that?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Do you also understand that in the state of Virginia, you do not have to touch those girls to be charged with homicide?”

  “No, I didn’t know that.”

  “Absolutely,” said Mayhew.

  Lloyd looked stunned.

  Unless he could offer something to prove his version of the story, he would be charged with murder.

  “You’re the one who abducted these girls, you raped these girls, and you killed them.
Do you understand where we’re coming from?” said Willis.

  Lloyd nodded glumly.

  “We’re here to give you your chance to tell us what you know,” said Mayhew. “You’ve got a lot of people saying, ‘Lloyd, Lloyd, Lloyd, Lloyd.’ Do we believe all that bullshit? No. We know other people are involved. We know they are all involved. But right now everybody is saying, ‘Lloyd.’ You’re the one who abducted these girls, you raped these girls, and you killed these girls. Do you understand where we’re coming from? You already know what we know. What we’re here for today is your side. Tell us what happened.”

  “Here’s the situation,” said Wilks. “Listen to me. Here’s the situation. We sit here and listen to all this bullshit, all we’re going to listen to. We have our case. We got it. If you want to take it all, that’s on you, buddy.”

  “I don’t want to take nothing,” said Lloyd.

  “Then tell us the truth.”

  “I told the truth.”

  “You conspired to commit an abduction that turned into a homicide. And I can tell you, the commonwealth attorney in Bedford County in Virginia, he’s a fair man, but he’s going to seek justice where justice is deserved. And those two little girls deserve justice. And he’s gonna get it.”

  “And I agree with you,” said Lloyd.

  “And he’s going to get it. Okay?”

  “I can’t tell you no more than I’ve already told them.”

  “That’s where it lies,” said Willis. “You can either get in contact with one of the Maryland people if some miraculous memory comes forward tonight, but you are going to be charged in Virginia.”

  Lloyd seemed cowed. Voices were raised. Lloyd said, “I’ll tell you what, let’s get a lawyer, and we’ll go from there!” All three detectives stood up to leave.

  “Absolutely,” said one.

  “Because I don’t need to say no more.”

  “Absolutely, Lloyd,” said another.

  “I mean, I’m sorry to waste y’all’s time.”

  “Not a waste of our time,” said Willis. “Not at all.”