The Last Stone Page 32

  Everything now worked in the detective’s favor, even Lloyd’s despondency. He was going to take the murder rap, so why not simply tell the truth?

  “Right,” said Dave. “You can’t really do any more damage than what’s already done.”

  Lloyd was feeling sorry for himself. He said he was resigned to his fate—death penalty, life in prison, whatever. It would come down to his word against his family’s, he said, “And what am I? A convict, a druggie—”

  “No—” said Dave, trying to check Lloyd, but he was on a roll.

  “An abuser—”

  “There’s some stuff we’ve done with what you’ve given us that—”

  “You know?”

  “You’d be surprised—”

  “Yeah, but it’s all looking toward me.”

  “Well, that’s the way people want to line it up, and, like I said, we’re going to talk about all that.”

  Lloyd asked whether the Virginia cops were back.

  “There’s a mess of people here today. I don’t know who is here and who is not here, because, you know what I did? To avoid that I came in and asked, ‘Is Lloyd here?’ I saw the guard sitting, and I came around the corner. I came right in. I avoided all that because that’s something I want to talk to you about.”

  “Okay, you know, at some point I’m gonna end up saying, ‘Lawyer up.’”

  “And you know what? There’s no disrespect to that.”

  “Yeah.”

  “There’s none.”

  “I mean, I did it at the beginning, but I’ve mellowed out and not said anything about a lawyer or anything like that, but if I feel like I’m being hammered too much by so many people, that’s what I’m gonna have to do.”

  “You know what?” said Dave. “We’ve sat in this room probably nine or ten times. You know what I’ve never ever done? Never told you anything about me, where I come from, my family. I mean, you don’t know shit about me.”

  “Yeah, I do,” said Lloyd. “I know more than what you think I know. Want me to tell you what I do know? You’re a cop but you’re a good guy. You have a good heart. You have what I call a generosity that goes above and beyond. That’s what I know about you. I don’t need to know nothin’ else.”

  “Well, I appreciate that.”

  Dave described himself as “from the country” and “just your average person.” He said, “I’ll never own a Fortune 500 company. At the end of the day, when this is over, I’ll be happy because I can go back to doing my minimal police work until I put in my five more years, and then I’m the hell out of here.” This was true. It had always been Dave’s approach to the job. He looked forward to leaving it in a few years and resuming life as a civilian, either taking over his father’s air-conditioning company or doing construction work. “But what I don’t want to see happen in this case is when they make the movie or they make the book, and it’s titled ‘The Lyon Sisters,’ I just don’t want it to star Lloyd Welch,” he said. “I want to see it ‘written by Lloyd Welch.’ You know what I mean?”

  Lloyd chuckled approvingly.

  “When we left here, what you told me in the end [Lloyd’s story about his uncle Dick killing and chopping up the girls under the bridge], it was from the heart. I knew it when it came out because I see it every time you do it. I want to say it wasn’t Lloyd Welch that had any involvement. Do I believe you saw it? Do I believe you stood by to make sure nobody walked down there? I don’t know.”

  “Oh, you’re talking about River Park?”

  “You got it.”

  “Oh, no. I didn’t see that.”

  Dave ignored him. He said he could readily understand how Lloyd might have been drawn into this thing by his family. He was an abused, rejected teenager. He yearned for acceptance. “If you got sucked into this, I can explain it that way,” he said. “Give me an idea of what the hell’s going on, Lloyd.”

  Lloyd said he had nothing more.

  Dave continued. He said he was so alone trying to hold off the horde of big shots clamoring for Lloyd’s head that, “I may not have a job when I walk out that door.”

  Then Lloyd offered something new: a motive. He said he’d received a letter from a woman who claimed to have known him back in his carny days. She said she had been approached back then by his uncle Dick, who had asked her to make a porn film. This was curious. Other family members had talked about Dick having porn films. Dave asked if there was any connection between the Lyon girls and those films.

  “See, that’s what I’m thinking,” said Lloyd. “I honestly believe that he [Dick] was going to do porn with them, because he had a camera. He did have a camera. Did he do it with them? I can’t say that part because I don’t know, but I’m thinking that the reason he had them upstairs for Easter, drugged up, is because he was planning on doing porn with them. I told you, he liked young girls.”

  “I think we’re getting somewhere,” said Dave.

  DID YOU FIND MY WEED?

  In the previous session, Dave had planted the idea of a “trump card.” In the days since, Lloyd had apparently pondered this. Today, he was prepared to play one—his “ace.”

  Since Lloyd was in a collaborative mood, Dave decided to tell him what he’d found.

  “The basement of your old house in Baltimore Avenue, unfinished—”

  “The house is still there?” asked Lloyd, surprised.

  “Not only is it still there, it doesn’t look like it’s changed.”

  Lloyd described the layout of the basement room.

  “In the back part there used to be a couch. That’s where me and Roy [his younger brother] used to get high all the time. Used to be a little couch, a chair … out of the way, out of mind.” He laughed.

  “Do you know if the girls were in that basement at any point in time?” Dave asked. He told Lloyd about the blood-test spray, saying, “And I think that we’re gonna be able to show that they were in that basement at some point.”

  “They might have been,” said Lloyd. “I never saw them there.”

  “Do you know if your dad had brought them over, because that would be an easier place to keep them. In a basement that’s dark. You only have access one way in and one way out. Eventually they were moved to Dickie’s for either Easter Sunday or the porn, when you get hoaxed into watching them. I’m trying to fill in some of these gaps.”

  “Well, I would say that in Dickie’s mind he would probably move them over there because Mom [Edna] didn’t go down after dark. And if me and Roy didn’t have nothing to get high with, we didn’t go down.”

  “Logically, if they were there, and he pulls up in a car, wouldn’t it make more sense if he was pulling up to get the girls? Who would pull up with two kidnapped girls in a car on a busy street in Hyattsville? Doesn’t matter what time it is. Think about it.”

  “Well, you see, you could drive all the way into the back there.”

  “Yeah, I know you could.”

  “Well, like I told you, when Dickie drove up the first time, and Lee and them were arguing, those girls were not in the car at all, you know?”

  “The girls aren’t there,” said Dave. “Are they in the basement?”

  “That’s a possibility. It’s a possibility, because—”

  “What are they arguing about? I mean, start thinking through that shit.”

  “They’re arguing about me going to the mall.”

  “So what you’re telling me without telling me is that your dad was involved in this.”

  “Yes.”

  “I mean, let’s just put that out there.”

  “Yeah. He was involved. I mean, that whole argument right there, that was the one reason why I was leaving to go to Virginia earlier than what I had planned, because me and Lee got into a big argument.”

  Dave walked him through some facts about his father, Lee. He would have been in his late mid- to late thirties at the time, a few years older than Dick.

  “It’s explainable where your role may fit into this thing,
but I can’t explain it unless you tell me. You follow what I’m saying?”

  “Right.”

  “I mean, it’s not rocket science here.”

  “I understand what you’re saying. I understand.”

  “You need to tell me just how it went down. Now your dad’s involved, and I know your dad and Dick planned this thing and you got sucked into it.”

  Lloyd was nodding, agreeing. Dave had him.

  “Tell me what the hell happened,” the detective said, tapping on the desk for emphasis. “It’s time. The only way you’re not going to eat this is to tell me actually what happened. We can back this shit up.”

  Lloyd said it would just be his word against Dick’s.

  “Well, I want to hear your word,” said Dave.

  Lloyd nodded and then looked down at the floor. He was thinking about it. Then came the question:

  “What kind of guarantee am I going to have?” he asked, finally.

  “Well, we’ll cross them bridges. We can’t get to that point until we know what we have.”

  Lloyd repeated that his uncle Dick had approached him, asking for help in picking up two girls to “party.” Then he said the real reason was “to make movies.”

  “He was into porn, and he wanted to make movies to make money,” Lloyd explained.

  Dave told him they had heard about Dick’s camera. Dick had shown a porn movie on the porch of his sister Lizzie and her husband Allen Parker’s house in Thaxton. It had come out in grand jury testimony, and Dick had acknowledged it. It was important, said Dave, because his uncle’s testimony corroborated it.

  “So don’t leave any details out,” he said.

  “Right.” Lloyd said he went to the mall with Dick and Lee. Notably, after months of insisting that Teddy had been the key player in the abduction, he now simply dropped Teddy from the story. The ease with which Lloyd made these shifts never ceased to amaze the squad. He acted as if he had never told the story differently.

  Lloyd said he had lured the girls himself by offering them pot, and the older one, Sheila, had dragged her little sister along. Sheila climbed into the front seat of the car between Dick and Lee; Kate got in the back with Lloyd. Dick was in his security guard uniform and was driving his wife’s station wagon. Dick gave Sheila a joint, he said, and when she tried it she began coughing. They drove around for about a half hour with Kate sniffling in the back seat and Dick and Lee arguing in the front about what to do next. They eventually drove to Dick’s house, and Lloyd left.

  When he returned the next day and saw his uncle raping one of the girls, he now said, his father was there too, filming it with Dick’s camera. Lloyd left and stayed at his father’s house for several days. During that time, he said, he did not know where the girls were. He and Helen were offered money and pot to watch the girls at Dick’s house on Easter Sunday, while the Welch family gathered at Lee’s. They found the girls, drugged, in the upstairs poolroom. Lloyd said he also saw Teddy at Dick’s house that day.

  “Whoa, they’re still here?” he said Teddy asked him.

  “Yeah, I don’t know what’s going on,” Lloyd said he told him.

  “Now, I don’t know if Teddy had sex with them. I don’t know if he was in it or not, the movies or anything like that, but he knew they were there.”

  This somewhat jibed with Teddy’s story, although Teddy said he’d had no idea who the girls were or even that they were in the house until he saw them in the upstairs room with Lloyd and Helen. Lloyd now said that Helen had stayed with the girls while he watched TV downstairs. She came to him once and asked, “Are they all right? They look like they’re sick or something.” It was after this, he said, that he decided to go to the mall and invent a story, not to help rescue the girls but “to steer them off me.” He was worried—as it turned out, with reason—that someone had seen him at the mall. When he returned, his stepmother was angry with him.

  “She knew that the girls were with Dickie and them. I guess about two, maybe three hours later, me and Lee get into an argument. ‘You dumb fuck, what’d you go to the mall for? The hell did you do that shit for? Goddamn, you stupid idiot,’ you know, cussin’ at me, calling me all kinds of names, smacked me around a couple of times. I took off, went upstairs. About that time, I guess, Dickie pulled up. I guess Mom had called him or Lee had called him. He came up. Them two was arguing. Like I said, I looked out the window. There was nobody in the car at that time.”

  When he went downstairs, Lloyd said, his uncle threatened him.

  “Get the fuck away from here before you get yourself hurt,” he said Dick told him. Then Lee phoned down to his sister’s house in Thaxton to tell her family to expect Lloyd and Helen. Before they left, Lloyd said, he and Helen saw Dick drive off with the girls toward the river and the bridge. Then they hitchhiked to Virginia. The rest of his story was the same: the station wagon pulling into the driveway in Virginia in the middle of the night, the bag, the bonfire.

  “That’s the whole story,” he said for the umpteenth time.

  This was not good enough, Dave told him. He asked Lloyd again about the bridge, the place where Lloyd said his uncle liked to fish.

  “If them girls were chopped up and burned, then that’s where he did it,” said Lloyd.

  “Well, it’s hard for me to believe that anybody would take two people, girls, boys, to an area that’s open to the public, whether it’s one o’clock in the morning, eight o’clock at night. You would expose yourself to the public. Out in the open. Anybody can walk up on you and see what you are doing. It’s harder for me to believe they’re going to do it in Pat’s house. You’ve got young kids there. You got people. You’re right next to a police station.”

  “Yeah,” Lloyd said.

  “So the next best spot would have been Baltimore Avenue. Not targeting you, but you brought your father into this thing. What makes the best sense? Where are you gonna hide two girls and keep them out of sight? Their pictures are everywhere. Everybody is looking for them. You’re not going to keep them in an open area. You’re not going to keep them in Dick and Pat’s house. So you’ve got to keep them down in this dungeon of a basement, dark, one way in and one way out, and there’s even a back room with a damn door on it that you can close. So we said, ‘Okay, let’s go look at it.’ We went and looked at it. That’s why I know it so well. I spent damn near ten hours in that basement yesterday.”

  If this concerned Lloyd, he didn’t show it.

  “Did you find my weed?” he asked. “I lost weed in there.”

  The quip was revealing in ways Lloyd did not intend. Dave was describing a dungeon-like room that had been used to imprison and kill children; to Lloyd it was a place of illicit fun, his old doping den. From the beginning, Lloyd had demonstrated this startling and apparently unconscious confusion about fun; he made no distinction between “partying” and the worst sort of cruelty. The equivalence was chilling.

  “Lee would go down there too,” Lloyd said. This was the other pillar of his defense—“there was no crime” was the first; “someone else did it” was the second.

  “You can’t get to it from inside the house,” said Dave. “It’s only on the outside.”

  “Right, and like I said, he had a key to that door.”

  Lloyd rambled a bit and then suggested that his uncle Dick might have been “trafficking” children. This could have been his plan from the beginning, to make child porn and then sell the Lyon girls to sex traffickers in Virginia.

  “And something went terribly wrong, and they had to kill them,” Lloyd said. “I honestly believe that’s the way it went down. That’s my opinion.”

  “Now, when you say that something went wrong, we’ve heard that,” said Dave.

  “I’m honestly believing one of them girls either tried to get away or something happened to where Dickie lost control,” said Lloyd. “And him and Lee killed them. Not on purposely now, not that they were intending to do that, you know. I’m believing it was actually a mishap. Unfort
unately.”

  “And then, obviously, when that happens, they—”

  “They got scared and took them to Virginia, and they would do the logical thing,” said Lloyd, finishing the detective’s thought. “Five hours away. Let’s get rid of them this way and nobody would ever find them.”

  “So, in your opinion, you think they were both killed in Maryland and then transported to Virginia? Or just the one that tried to get away was killed, and then the other one was still alive and went to Virginia? Because, I’m telling you, there’s some weird shit in Virginia as well, as far as your cousin Henry.”

  “I’m honestly thinking that the younger one is the one that tried to get away, because she’s the one that didn’t want to get high and that I was telling you about. She’s the one that caused the chaos or whatever, and they killed her, because that bag—like Henry was saying—yeah, it was heavy.”

  “You caught yourself there, and I caught it, too,” said Dave.

  Lloyd had been about to confirm how heavy the bag was and had stopped himself, alertly shifting the recollection to Henry. Dave didn’t press him on it; instead he reiterated how young Lloyd had been at the time and how readily he might have been drawn into this by his father and uncle. But Lloyd continued to insist he had not taken the bag to Virginia, that he and Helen had hitchhiked there. He stuck to the rest of his story, too.

  “Okay, so if they killed her and something went bad, it probably wasn’t at Dick and Pat’s house,” said Lloyd.

  “I’m saying that, in my opinion, it was probably at Lee’s house,” said Dave.

  You could imagine the wheels turning in Lloyd’s head. The Bluestar spray was actual evidence, and he usually didn’t push back for long against hard evidence. Dave showed Lloyd a picture on his cell phone of the basement space, lit up with traces of blood. He said he thought they could get a DNA match (which turned out not to be true).

  “It wasn’t my basement,” said Lloyd.

  Dave chided him: “Lloyd was in the mall. Lloyd was staying at that house. They ended up in that house. You just follow the logic. That’s what I’m saying. That’s why I need for you to fill in these gaps. There’s only so much we can do with what we’re presented with.”