“No, you don’t. I agree with you about that.”
Sheila Lyon was still alive in the car, Lloyd speculated, and was passed on to Henry, who abused her for a time and then killed her—Henry had told a story about him, so Lloyd now told a story about Henry. But he said he was just guessing.
Each time Lloyd made a change to his narrative, it triggered a cascade of ill-considered implications. Dave had learned to spot these and pounce. Dave now pointed out how improbable it was for both Lloyd and Helen to have arrived at Taylor’s Mountain coincidentally on the same day his uncle Dick showed up with a body in a bag. If Lloyd now admitted that his father had called in advance, that showed something else.
“That’s the preplanning that they put together to bring the girls, live, dead, one dead, one alive, down there,” said Dave. “That’s what we’re talking about. It’s been a week, eight days from the day they went missing until they ended up in Virginia. There’s no feasible way that Dick kept them in his house without your aunt Pat knowing. Think about it.”
“Yeah, I agree with you, but where he kept them I don’t know.”
“If Dick has these two girls—whether they are alive or dead—in his house, there had to have been a lot of chatter about what are we gonna do as a family? How are we gonna resolve this? Can’t just open the door and say, ‘Get out.’”
“Right.”
“I’m thinking, normal folks, made a mistake, now we’re left with this mess. That’s all that was talked about. There has to be a moment of panic.”
This made too much sense for Lloyd to deny.
“Yep. I was suckered into going up there, but nobody told me what was going to happen. Nobody said anything to me. Like I said, I was the black sheep of the family.”
“Let me put it this way,” Dave said. “Did you get suckered into going to Virginia to let them know they need to start a fire? Not knowing what you were really doing? And when you got down there they show up with this car and a bag? Did you go down to lay the groundwork?”
“Nope.”
“So they just literally followed you down there?”
“I don’t know if they followed me down there or not. All I can say is, he showed up knowing I was going to be down there.”
“Why wouldn’t he have given you a ride?”
“Me and Dickie didn’t see eye to eye like that. We weren’t that close. I mean, he got me to do that there, you know, to talk the girls into partying and stuff, but as far as me and him sittin’ and havin’ a conversation? Nah. Never happen.”
“But he trusted you enough to go out and do something like this.”
“I guess he figured that me being high all the time, me leaving all the time—”
“But look at the ace in your pocket. I mean, let’s say in the nineties when you get hit with this [child-molestation charge], you could have looked at them and said, ‘Hey, I’ve got something on my uncle.’”
Lloyd nodded.
“So he trusted you enough that you wouldn’t say something. Why?”
“I’m … that’s a good question,” said Lloyd, folding his arms and leaning back. He had clearly never considered this. And Dave was right. The abduction of the Lyon sisters, the most notorious unsolved crime in the region’s modern memory, would have been an ace indeed. It might have given Lloyd real leverage. He had complained bitterly about the unfairness of his prison sentence. Here was something he might have traded to reduce his time. And by Lloyd’s own account, there was no love lost between him and his uncle. He had no good answer.
“After so many years I did forget about it,” he said, weakly. “I honestly did.”
Who forgets kidnapping two little girls? If this was going to be his play before the grand jury, Dave suggested, he might as well give it up and confess to the whole thing. It wouldn’t fly. In Henry they had an eyewitness to—a participant in—throwing the bag on the fire. Connie corroborated it. Henry said he’d done it with Lloyd; Lloyd said Henry had done it with Dick.
“Is Lloyd the one telling the truth?” Dave asked. “Is Henry telling the truth? Now, Henry is in a bad situation because emotionally he doesn’t know how to deal with it. I think as he’s gotten older, he’s gotten soft.”
Lloyd nodded and grinned.
“That’s weird, because Henry used to be a nasty little ass.”
“His health’s bad. He knows he probably has only a couple more years, if that, to live. What would bother Henry the most? Do you think there’s direct involvement?”
“I would,” said Lloyd. “I would say that it’s tearing him up so much because he got involved with one of the girls. Like I said earlier, something went wrong. It’s already went so far, and he killed ’em, and it’s tearing him up. See, it’s eating me up inside but in a different way. I didn’t kill them. I didn’t rape them. I just walked ’em out of the mall and got them in the car. I’m guilty of that. That’s as far as I’m guilty of. Them doin’ what they did is tearing them up more. It’s not tearing me up that they’re dead. It’s tearing me up that I even got involved. There’s times I could kick myself in the ass for even getting involved into going and getting them, but as far as them dying and me having a hand in it, I can’t say it’s tearing me up.”
He repeated his belief that Dick gave Henry the older girl.
“He had sex. They told him to get rid of ’em, and this thing about the tire iron?” Henry had earlier speculated that Lloyd might have killed one of the girls with a tire iron on the drive down from Maryland. “He’s probably saying the tire iron because that’s probably what he used.” Lloyd laughed. “I mean, that’s the only thing I can think. Why would he say a tire iron?”
“That’s what I said. It’s an odd thing to say. What do you think Henry would have done with the second girl?”
“He probably put her in the fire.”
“Do you think both of them went in that fire?”
“Yep. If Henry killed her.”
Lloyd said the fire reeked so badly in the morning that it made Helen nauseated.
WHEN WE GOT THERE
Wearing Lloyd down worked. On interview days he was awakened early and kept waiting in Dover police headquarters. He would sit alone and shackled for hours in the interview room before the squad arrived. Then they tag-teamed him. Chris stayed back, watching on a monitor. Dave would engage Lloyd for hours on end, taking him back over the same ground again and again, alternately wooing and threatening him, offering him what looked like avenues of escape. His story wasn’t good enough, Dave kept telling him. If they were going to make charges stick against his uncle or his cousin, they needed something more. They needed verifiable details. Through it all Lloyd kept lying, and Dave mostly just absorbed his whoppers and excuses without contradiction. He repeatedly assured Lloyd that somehow all of this was working to his benefit, urging him to fight back against his family. After a lunch break, Mark and Katie would work Lloyd over for hours more. Katie played stubbornly on his conscience, stressing how certain she was that he had one, what a truly decent fellow he was at heart, how in her eyes he was always trying to do the right thing, tenaciously egging him on to display this inherent decency. Mark continued to bang away at all the obvious holes in his story.