Dave was less sold. He did not have as much invested in the Mileski hypothesis, and his hours one-on-one with Lloyd had heightened his misgivings about him. But Chris was in charge, and his priority made sense. Together they set out to reinterview all of Mileski’s relatives and his seedy old circle.
They got help. It was a sign of how nettling the unsolved crime remained for the department that its assistant chief, Russ Hamill, told Chris he could have as many detectives as he needed. For a case nearly four decades old, this was unprecedented. The first to join them, in November, was Mark Janney, a no-nonsense cop’s cop, tall and athletic (a basketball player in college), the son of a Maryland state trooper—he carried his late father’s badge with him. Mark was forty-six. His father had risen to the top ranks of the state police, but Mark had no passion for promotion. What he loved was the work itself. He had spent most of his twenty-two years with the department working undercover, making drug buys on the street in his mid-twenties, graduating to federal task force work against drug dealers. In more recent years he’d worked on homicides. He found the job thrilling. Off duty he consumed true crime books; the Lyon case was just the sort of stumper to grab him. At the time he joined the squad, his two daughters were about the same ages Sheila and Kate had been in 1975, which brought the outrage and tragedy of it home. He would return from work feeling guilty about his own good fortune and acutely aware of John and Mary’s loss. Mark’s size and stern mien made him the most physically intimidating member of the squad, and he would play that role comfortably. When it came time to lean on someone, it was generally Mark who did the leaning. He was briefed on Mileski and Welch, and in December rode out to Dover with Dave to meet Lloyd for himself. It was an informal visit—they did not even tell Pete Feeney about it, much to the prosecutor’s later chagrin. Chris and Dave wanted Mark to size up Lloyd Welch for himself. To Mark, it was simple. He had watched some of the video of the first interview and was appalled foremost by the way Lloyd described (and excused) his crime. Mark reckoned him a sociopath, a man self-interested to the exclusion of feelings for others, not just without remorse but incapable of it.
All through the holidays at the end of 2013, the squad sought out and questioned face-to-face, one by one, Mileski’s contacts. To each they described Lloyd and Helen and showed pictures, but no one recognized them. Mileski’s surviving son, who was familiar with his father’s illicit circle, said Lloyd looked familiar but could not be sure. The conversations, meanwhile, led them deeper into Mileski’s furtive underworld, one that Chris believed had enlisted young Lloyd Welch and into which they feared Sheila and Kate had fallen.
Unable to confirm the link between Welch and Mileski independently, they were stuck with getting Lloyd to admit it. He had been adamant in that first session that there was no link, but the detectives had observed that his defenses weakened when he grew rattled and tired. It was after he’d been caught in a lie in his most recent witness statement that he’d admitted, eight hours into the session, that the man he had seen taking the girls from the mall was Mileski. So making him rattled and weary became a strategy. Mark took a step in this direction during the unofficial visit. He told Lloyd that the department was considering linking him publicly to the case, naming him a “person of interest.” This would not identify him as a suspect, at least not formally, but would amount to the same thing. A press conference would broadcast his image and recap his criminal past. It would be a public shaming. Like most sex offenders, Lloyd had labored to keep the nature of his offense quiet. As the squad well knew, it would disturb his life on many levels, not least within the prison itself, where pedophiles were held in vicious contempt.
This was no idle threat. The department was eager. Lloyd’s connection to the case seemed certain, and the FBI was curious enough about other children’s disappearances to believe that shaking the tree—spreading word of his involvement—might scare up new leads not just in the Lyon case but in others. For their part, however, the squad members didn’t like the timing. If they named Lloyd publicly, it would be hard to sustain the pretense that they wanted him as a witness—which remained Chris’s primary goal. It would almost certainly shut Lloyd up for good. Chris was holding his superiors off. He wanted one more crack at him.
Lloyd had given them a pretext. He’d asked to be polygraphed. The detectives didn’t believe the machine actually detected lies, and evidently neither did Lloyd, because he seemed confident it would get him off the hook. But the device didn’t have to be foolproof to be useful. It scared those who believed in it, and it made even those who didn’t anxious. Told they’d flunked the test, some suspects panicked and came clean. This is what the squad hoped would happen with Lloyd. But giving it could also backfire. If he passed, it would embolden his mendacity.
To conduct the test, Chris invited Katie Leggett, the department’s premier polygrapher. She was a veteran detective, age thirty-nine, with long experience in the sex crimes unit. Funny, smart, and outgoing, she had set out to become a lawyer, until she realized she hated spending all her time in a law library. Her brother was a police officer, and she had an uncle and a cousin in uniform. Their work seemed more exciting, so after sampling some college classes in criminal justice, Katie went for it. She had endured the mandatory years of patrol duty. Wearing the bulky, manly uniform bugged her, and she found the work unsatisfying. Particularly discouraging was seeing so many of those she arrested go free. The system did not punish offenders the way she believed they ought to be punished. But the job changed for her when she made detective. The work was more consistently interesting. She could dress fashionably. Her colleagues teased her about being “prissy,” but Katie felt like herself again. She had blond hair that fell to her shoulders, wore designer shoes, and carried her Glock in a Louis Vuitton handbag. There was nothing prissy beneath the gloss. Her appetite for harsh justice led her to specialize in child-abuse cases, where both the law and the societal mood were less tolerant. Those she busted went to jail. She did it for eleven years, during which time she had two children of her own. Eventually, the work began to wear on her. It says something about the awfulness of sex crimes that she sought refuge working on homicides.
This was where she was when the Lyon squad came calling. Katie did not know Chris, Dave, or Mark. She knew little about the case, even though she had grown up in the Washington area and, of course, had heard about the Lyon sisters. The squad wanted both her polygraph skills and her sex crimes experience. Accustomed as she was to the worst forms of sexual predation, she would hardly be unnerved by someone like Lloyd. Katie was a talker and was also attractive. Her conspicuously feminine style would also play well. She was perfect.
But she said no. The case seemed too difficult, and weak. The squad didn’t have much to go on. She had other reasons. Her youngest was still a baby. Katie was looking to pull back from the ugliness, not dive in over her head.
But the squad persisted, enlisting one of her friends, Karen Carvajal, to plead on their behalf and to help with the polygraph session, and Katie gave in. She eventually came to believe it was fated, finding almost spooky connections with Sheila and Kate. She had been only eleven months old when the girls disappeared, but her birthday, March 30, was the same as Sheila’s, and she shared Kate’s name. Their child photos looked a lot like hers, and she had hung out in Wheaton Plaza herself as a girl. When she first introduced herself to John and Mary, they had been struck by these things. She was moved when they suggested that her involvement “was meant to be.”