Free Lethal Guardian by M. William Phelps Page B

murderer.”
    The way Dee saw it, her job was to keep her family intact and be the force of strength that held them together through their horrible tragedy.
    “[The detectives’] job,” Dee later said, “was to find my son’s killer.”
    If Charlie Snyder thought his days of being interrogated by the ED-MCS were behind him, he thought wrong. On the afternoon of March 23, Snyder looked out the cracked front windowpane of his office and saw Reggie Wardell and another detective walking from their state-issued blue Crown Victoria into Blonders for a third time.
    As they walked in, Charlie once again stopped them at the door and led them outside, thinking, What the fuck is this?
    Standing atop of the hood of an old Chevy Caprice lying on the ground in the parking lot, Wardell looked Charlie squarely in the eyes and said, “We want you to take a lie detector test.”
    Charlie became incensed, but he kept his anger in check, smiled coyly, then started walking toward his office door without saying anything. Then, “Come with me,” he said, gesturing with his hand as he opened the door. “Come on. Let’s go!”
    The office Charlie kept was a tomb of stacked books on car parts and old customer files piled anywhere there was available space. There were alternators and distributor caps, old air cleaners and carburetors lying on chairs and filing cabinets. It was hard to tell what color the carpet had been because it was black and soiled with grime, oil and dirt. On the wall there was a gun rack with one shotgun set up in it. Charlie kept his .38 revolver in his top, center desk drawer, right next to a stack of cash, counted and banded.
    Sifting through the rubble, he found the phone.
    “Hold on one minute, gentlemen,” he said.
    Wardell, undoubtedly knowing what was going on, just looked at his partner without saying anything.
    After a few brief pleasantries to his lawyer, Charlie said, “Listen, this is the third time these cops have been here and they’re questioning me on a murder. What are my rights?”
    “You don’t have to tell them a fucking thing! Hand the phone to one of them.”
    Charlie gave Wardell the phone.
    “Unless you have a warrant, leave the premises right away.”
    Wardell motioned to the other detective and they left without another word.
    Later, Charlie remembered how he felt that day.
    “After two meetings with them, they still didn’t ask to do forensics on my thirty-eight, when they knew damn well it was the same caliber that had killed Buzz. They knew I didn’t have anything to do with his murder. They were just seeing what they could get away with. After that day, I never heard from them again.”
    “The questioning of Charlie Snyder,” Reggie Wardell said later, “became more intense every time we spoke to him. We looked at Charlie as someone who was possibly involved in the murder of Buzz. We’re not just working on one case. We’re always worried that something will slip through the cracks. So it makes us be more thorough in our investigation. That’s why we interview so many people. We had to scratch people off our list. When Mrs. Clinton said she thought it might have been the state trooper who Buzz got into a skirmish with, even though he was one of us, we had to check it out. When people told us Charlie Snyder had threatened Buzz, we had to look at it.”
    Asked if his final interview with Snyder had gone the way Charlie later described it, Wardell said, “Not quite.” Wardell had a smile on his face. “Charlie was much more cooperative.”
    Days later, however, after talking with Charlie’s therapist and getting a statement that proved his alibi, the ED-MCS steered away from Charlie and set its sights on two other suspects who had recently been put on their radar screen.

Chapter 8
    Deep River, Essex, Old Saybrook, Old Lyme and East Lyme are located at the tail end of Route 9, a two-lane highway system that begins in Elmwood, Connecticut, a suburb of Hartford, and ends at