The detective had lain awake the night before, wondering how to handle the interview. The truth was that they had never adequately prepared for these sessions with Lloyd. They needed to be smarter. For the first session they had prepped long and hard, but then they had seen Lloyd as a witness. The second meeting had been about introducing Lloyd to Mark, and in the third, which included Katie’s polygraph test, they had hoped to sort out which version of his story to believe and perhaps shake him up enough to extract the truth. The fourth had been designed to take advantage of the blow struck by the press conference, to pressure him, but had only backed him deeper into his corner and produced the dubious story about Teddy. It had one positive outcome; they no longer needed to worry about Lloyd’s refusing to see them. The press conference had hurt him badly. If he were going to shut down, it would have happened then. The FBI’s estimation that Lloyd would clam up had clearly been off base. Now the squad needed to rebuild rapport, and for that they needed a sound strategy. What had they learned about him? What could they use?
Nobody ever tells you when you go into police work that it will require dishonesty. The objective, it would seem, is the opposite, utter honesty. But once you get into the really interesting stuff, you descend, by necessity, a moral ladder onto slippery ground where the truth is a liability. This was one of the reasons Katie had felt the need to escape the sex crimes unit. To catch the child molester or the possible child killer, she’d had to play along, to pretend—convincingly—sympathy and even amity. This sometimes made her skin crawl.
Dave knew that was where he was headed. It was the basis of his approach to all the suspects he had interrogated, and it came naturally to him. The armored-car robber who had confessed and then led him and Chris to the buried loot had done so because Dave had won him over, had convinced him that he was on his side. He had reasoned with him, had talked him into believing that cooperation was the only thing that might help him. This was a standard tactic, one that most seasoned criminals saw through; but fewer did so with Dave, because he was able to summon something like real empathy for the accused. In his years of detective work he had seen disadvantaged defendants get creamed by the justice system for crimes that warranted leniency, and also the opposite. He remembered in particular a well-spoken, white, presentable high school teacher who had gone on an armed-robbery spree to support a drug habit, and who got off in court with a slap on the wrist. Dave felt the educated criminal with the good job was, if anything, more culpable than someone who committed a crime out of desperation or stupidity. His default posture was to try to understand the poor sucker in deep trouble. And yet, on another level, Dave knew that empathy itself was a ploy. Earning trust was nearly always a ruse. Cooperation rarely worked to a suspect’s benefit. The armored-car robber got a life sentence—so much for coming clean to his good buddy, Dave! The detective coped with this duplicity by narrowing his vision. He focused only on the relationship he developed with a suspect inside the interview room, looking neither back nor forward. The simplicity of the room helped. Small, windowless, and bare, it constricted the world to the conversation. But the work required more, he knew. It meant donning moral blinders to the terrible things his subject might have done, to the consequences that might await the subject, and to his own behavior. In that confined space, Dave became a suspect’s last best friend.
His determination not to dwell on the crime itself was why Dave had never met John and Mary Lyon. To feel their pain and to obsess about their daughters’ fate would make it harder to act chummy with Lloyd. Unless he could summon some genuine empathy for Lloyd, his act would be all pretense—and unconvincing. It was easier to adopt this approach because Lloyd, Dave understood, was also playing false. It was a game. Each man was trying to get over on the other. It was something Dave enjoyed as much as Lloyd seemed to enjoy it—although the stakes were clearly higher for Lloyd. So far, as Dave saw it, he, Dave, was losing. But he had clearly established himself as the “good cop.” Now he would play it to the hilt. Mark and Katie soon would be calling him Lloyd’s “Wubbie.”
APRIL 24, 2014
They met again in the same interview room upstairs at Dover Police Headquarters. Lloyd, in his bright orange denim, with his hands shackled in his lap, looked dejected. He was seated on one side of the desk and Dave on the other. The detective slid across a large cup of coffee. Lloyd hardly stirred. He looked thinner still, his white goatee longer, the patches of hair left on his scalp straggly.
“Does he have to be hooked up?” Dave asked the two guards at the door, pointing to the chains attached to Lloyd’s handcuffs.
“We can take the travel gear off, but the cuffs will stay on,” said one.
“Do you mind?” he asked.
The chains were removed.
“What’s happening, brother?” he asked Lloyd cheerfully.
Lloyd rubbed his eyes with his cuffed hands and sighed heavily.
“Nothin’,” he said, glumly.
“Long morning again?”
“I’ve been in these things since six this morning.”
“I know there’s been a lot of undue pressure put on you,” began Dave. “It’s been a lot of pressure put on the community and on this police department to try to get this thing to come to a head. And one of the reasons I wanted to sit down with you is because I think I’ve come up with some different things.”
He said he wanted them to start over.
“It’s going to be very laid-back, very informal. I wanted to start off by saying I apologize for the last six or eight months, the way that this unfolded on you, as well as how it’s obviously affected you, how it’s displaced you in the prison—”
“Yeah, look at me,” Lloyd said. He was feeling sorry for himself. In his life summary, written at about this time, he complained, “I am treated like a piece of shit now. Maybe that is what I am now. I have been the black sheep of a family that has never loved me or cared about me. I guess I will die that way.”
Lloyd referred back to their first meeting, laughing bitterly: “That’s when my life went to hell. Seventeen years of work, trying to do good in this penitentiary and change my life around, and all in three months’ time it went downhill. I mean, I can’t even go into population now. They got me on lockdown. Pure, pure lockdown.”
“I think a lot of that’s for your safety, just based on the media release.”
“Yeah, that’s what it was. Then I hear the people that I’ve known for years have been telling all kinds of bull crap about me.”
“They have,” said Dave. “I have been talking to several of them. I don’t know that I believe them, but I had to talk to them. I mean they’re all reaching out to us.”
“Well, that’s what I don’t understand. What they’re talking to y’all about. They don’t know nothing about me, what’s put me in jail, you know? Because I didn’t share nothing with nobody. I didn’t share my life with nobody.”
“I can tell you’re a little upset, but I think after today—”
“I’m a little discouraged about a lot of things. I got officers treatin’ me like shit, talkin’ shit about me. I’ve had a few of them threaten me.”