He knew more than he was saying.
“You want to say,” Karen continued, “but you’re afraid [of] what is going to happen if you do. Were you just on the sidelines or did somebody make you do something you didn’t want to do? It’s not your fault that something happened that day.”
“I can’t tell you something that—”
“It’s the person who orchestrated this whole thing. Right? Do you agree? They’re the ones who should take the responsibility, right?”
“Whoever did something to them, yeah. But I didn’t do anything.”
“Let’s say there were a couple of people involved. Do you think everybody is equally responsible?”
“I can’t say.”
But Lloyd seemed drawn to this line of reasoning. Karen was offering him a way to admit the crime without taking responsibility. Katie returned as Karen said, “My question is, you had the person who made the plan, and that person says, ‘Hey, come on over.’ Then this other person [Lloyd] shows up, and it’s like, holy shit! They did something bad with those girls. Do you think that other person [Lloyd] is responsible?”
“Yeah! But I don’t think it’s his fault. And it wasn’t me!”
“It’s just that you know something that you’re not telling us, and that’s why we’re having a conflict,” she said. “I know Katie’s pissed off and she’s disappointed because she felt like she gave you the benefit of the doubt, and she feels like it’s making her look bad, and I’m still here telling you that I’m still giving you the benefit of the doubt.”
“And I’m sorry it’s making you … that you’re fighting with that, because I have been honest with you. I don’t know why I didn’t pass that test. I was relaxed, comfortable, and everything like that.”
“Well, it’s offensive for you to think that we are tricking you,” said Katie.
“Well, you can change anything on a computer.”
“Do you really, honestly—”
“I do! You’re a cop!”
“Does that make me a bad person?”
“No! No! But I’m just saying.”
“You’ve never had a good experience with a cop?”
“No.”
“No?”
“No. I’ve never had an officer offer to help me on anything. Even when I asked.”
“Well, I’m sorry about that.”
“It’s not y’all’s fault.”
“Have I been obnoxious or rude or tried to trick you in any way?”
“No.”
“This test wasn’t a trick.”
“It’s my opinion, that’s all,” he said. “I apologize and all that, but that’s just my opinion.”
Karen said the state’s attorney would be disbarred if he lied to him. She defended Dave’s trustworthiness—they could all see that Lloyd liked Dave and trusted him. Katie defended herself.
“You don’t trust police,” she said. “I get it. I don’t care. I mean, I don’t take it personally. Honestly, Lloyd, if I were in your same situation, I’d be doing the same thing. If I had a life of shit with cops—and Karen and I have seen enough shit cops in our career, and they exist—so I can completely believe you. Cops that make me disgraced to be a part of the same fraternal order as them because they suck. I get it. I’m not a sucky person. Karen is not a sucky person.”
“And I don’t think you are,” said Lloyd.
“And I wouldn’t be a part of anything that would make me lose sleep. Tricking somebody. This is a cat-and-mouse game. Let’s be honest. But you’ve got to play clean, and you’ve got to play fair, and telling somebody that they are bullshit is not in my DNA.”
Katie made a plea. She said she had formed a high opinion of Lloyd, and that it would be dashed if he didn’t help them. “As a mom, and I would certainly hope you would feel the same, as a father, those girls, they deserve to be commemorated and properly buried. Their parents deserve to have some peace, and for their girls to finally rest in peace. The bottom line is, that’s what we want. That’s what I want. I don’t care, even if you did it, you’ve done your time in here. You’ve been in hell. I don’t care about that stuff. I care for me, as a mom, as a cop near the end of my career, that those girls get what they deserve. What happened happened, and we can’t go back. We can only move forward and change how we’re gonna handle the situation. I don’t know how I would feel if I find out that later, once this thing erupts and the information’s out there, if you don’t take advantage of this opportunity.”
“If I could give it to them, I would!” said Lloyd, exasperated. “I’m sorry!
But then, after all these hours of denial, after all the back-and-forth without an inch given, abruptly there came a break. Lloyd suggested that if he were given some further assurance of immunity, his answers might be different.
Katie asked, “If they got a public defender for you that sat at this table with our state’s attorney, and one of these guys made you a deal that was happy to you, do you think you would remember something? Tell me the truth.”
“Honestly, I can’t say yes or not to that,” said Lloyd.
If they set all that up and came back tomorrow, Katie asked, would he have something helpful?
“I can’t say yes and I can’t say no.”
“But it’s possible?”
“Anything is possible.”
I’M GOING TO GIVE YOU SOMETHING
And that appeared to be that. After hours of grilling, the pretest chatter, the test itself, the hammering at Lloyd after he’d failed, all of it had brought them back around to the beginning. The detectives felt played.
Katie apologized for losing her temper. She said it was the Irish in her. Karen reassured Lloyd, “We’re still cool.”
Dave entered and said he had been listening outside the door. He endorsed the idea of arranging a meeting for Lloyd with a lawyer. He thought they could hold off releasing Lloyd’s name to the press.
“I’m going to have to dig really deep down and ask for some favors,” he said. He would find Lloyd a Delaware public defender, who could meet with him privately before they spoke again. It might take time. “But the flip side of that is, I don’t want to go through all that hassle and make this work if we’re not going to gain anything additional.”
Lloyd suddenly turned to Katie and Karen. “Could you two step out for a minute?”
“Absolutely,” said Katie. She and Karen left and closed the door behind them.
“I’m going to give you something, Dave, and you think about this,” he said. “Okay? I wasn’t involved.”
“Okay.”
“With the grabbing of the girls. The picture you showed me was the guy that did, that took the girls, and, yes, I used to get high with them and stuff like that. We took them to his house. I went over to the house. When I was getting ready to pull in I heard screams, a kid. I got scared, and I looked in and everything like that. I seen men there. I ran. That’s why I went back to the mall.”