"Do you understand you have the right to terminate this interview at any time? You know, just say, 'Brian, stop.' And that's it. Do you understand that?" Harris said.

"Yes, sir," she answered, her voice cracking. An avalanche of emotion was rumbling. This was clear from Christine's facial expressions. She was feeling the weight of killing four people and the consequences of that crime, which were right around the corner.

Harris leaned forward, a foot or two away from Christine, put his elbows on his knees, and spoke with his hands. "Look, in order for me to understand what happened, for you to speak about the emotions you say you've been going through, you have to waive, give up your right, so I can hear what's going on, what happened."

Before he could finish, Christine broke down, bawling like a child, pulling that raincoat-yellow blanket even tighter, as if she could somehow disappear inside it.

"Do you understand? I know you're scared. But are you ready to tell me what happened?"

More tears. No words.

"Let me ask you this," Harris said. "I see that you're crying, okay. When we talked earlier about justice and mercy"-this was one of Harris's themes to get a suspect to understand that he (the cop) was not there to judge or condemn, but only wanted to understand and get to the truth-"you remember that?"

Christine nodded through more tears. She looked down. Stared at the floor. The immensity of this horrible crime was implicit in the way she squirmed.

Harris spoke about people getting what they deserve-justice-and others getting what they need-mercy. He explained how important this was within the context of what he and Christine needed to get into. Before the formal interview started, Harris had spoken to Christine about his philosophy behind mercy and justice, and how this would decide what type of person she was and what type of penance she was going to ultimately receive. Christine had a chance at mercy, Harris had explained in no uncertain terms. She had a moment here where she could ask for and receive compassion, at least from him. It would not save her from any potential penance. But Harris was clear that we all had a choice when facing that mountain of judgment; and Christine was there, standing before it. She could climb over, or turn around and walk away.

"Do you believe," Harris asked after Christine refused to say anything for a few beats, "that you deserve justice or mercy?"

She was interested in this. He could see her eyes light up. She squeaked her answer through tears, stretching out the word "M-e-r-r-r-c-c-c-y," while nodding her head to Harris and repeating it.

"Okay," Harris said. He sat back.

"Yes," she said, again nodding. "Yes, yes. Very much so."

Harris found an opening.

"Okay . . . I'd like to be able to understand why. . . . Can you give us some insight as to what's going on? Okay?"

This seemed to lighten Christine's load. "Justice for him?" she asked. "Justice for him and mercy for me? Or justice for him?" She sounded confused.

"Well, when you mean 'for him,' who are you talking about?"

"Justice for him," she repeated. "Mercy for me."

"Okay," Harris said, raising his voice, "when you say justice for 'him,' now who do you mean?"

"Chris Snider."

"Okay, now mercy for who?"

"Me."

"Okay, okay. Well, tell me why, then?"

With that, Christine broke into one of those chest-thumping crying fits that moved her entire upper body up and down. She did not say anything right away.

"Look, all I can go by right now," Harris said in a cop-type authoritative voice, "is what other people have told me and"-he paused-"and what Chris has told me." Another pause. Then: "I mean, you don't have to tell me anything. I'll just go with what we have."

They had not spoken to Chris Snider. In fact, HPD had no idea where he was.

"Do you understand?"

"Yes, sir," she said in a high-pitched voice, nodding.

"Okay. What happened?"

Christine sat still for a brief moment. "He can't have contact with me, right?"

"Excuse me?" Harris asked. "He cannot contact you. . . ."

"I don't want him to hurt my family. . . ," she said, crying harder, "or anybody to hurt my family."

"Has he threatened your family in the past?"

Christine looked off to her right, as if the question hurt her.

"Let me ask you. Tell me what kind of person Chris was?"

"Um . . . he was very . . . just . . . um . . . very"-she looked at the floor, thinking, going back, or maybe trying to come up with something that would suffice-"um . . . hopeless. Just a hopeless person." Then she broke out of her shell a bit: "He was begging me for all that pity, you know. I am the type of person . . . you know . . . I have always dated, you know, stupid guys, just because, you know, I think that I can help them. Get them back on their feet. You know, all the wonderful stuff that I could never do." She reached across the table (startling Harris) to grab a tissue. "But then . . . like . . . you know . . . but then . . . there was times, you know, when I meant everything to him. But that was when, you know, whenever I was giving him whatever he wanted. You know, towing him when he wanted . . . sticking up for him, lying to him, or lying for him. . . ."

She carried on about how she had always felt alone and that everyone was against her and out to get her, and that Chris Snider had made her feel special for the first time in her life.

Harris explained that they needed to talk about her family, Chris Snider, her entire life, why she had been estranged from her mother for so long, and all things Christine; but first, before they could get into any of that, Harris stressed, they needed to go back to July 18, 2003, and get that out in the open.

"So tell me?" Harris asked.

Christine slumped. This was the classic tell suspects gave when they were ready to confess. Her body curled into a question mark. She stared at the ground, this time intently. She did not cry.

Christine was focused. Thinking. She was back in the Rowell house on that day. In the moment.

Then it came out: "We were at my house," she began, "and it was just . . . me and him there." They were hanging out. Dating at the time. She talked about Chris smoking some weed at the house. She didn't want him to. "Put that out," she had told him. "I don't want that stuff in the house. Listen," she then said to Harris, as if it was some sort of admission, "I am not going to lie. I smoked some, too. But I would never bring it into my parents' house."

Next she talked about the fight she and Chris had on that day.

"I was nagging at him and yelling at him," she said. "He was like, 'Fine, I'm gonna leave then. Take me home.' I was like, 'No, no. . . .' I finally just gave in, whatever, and, you know, and . . ." She couldn't finish.

The tears came back.

The horror.

Memories of murder.

"You were seventeen and thought you were in love," Harris said.

Christine took a moment to regroup. Then explained-finally-how she and Chris had left her house and driven to his house. Snider was acting crazy by then, she said, referring to him as "psycho guy," and she didn't want to know what was going to happen next, so she went along with whatever he said. Part of dealing with Snider on that day, Christine suggested, was going along with a plan he had to steal some drugs from Marcus and Tiffany. It was a plan, she explained, that she neither knew about beforehand, or had any role in developing.

CHAPTER 49.

THE WAY SHE described the murders to Harris on this day, you'd have to believe that Christine Paolilla was in a state of panic, fear, and under the Manson-like control of a madman who was going kill her and her family if she didn't go along with him and keep this terrible secret.

Christine was in Chris Snider's room, inside his parents' house, about an hour from Clear Lake. She thought he was in the kitchen, searching for another joint to smoke. He became increasingly hostile and angry because she had made him douse his last bit of weed, and now he wanted more.

According to Christine's first "official" version of the murders, Chris came out of his father's bedroom (not the kitchen) and said, "Take me to Seabrook."

"For what?" Christine asked him.

He didn't answer.

"Why, Chris?" she said. "Because you ain't got no more dope here and you need to get over there and get some?"

"Just take me," he said.

"We were kind of, like, talking about normal stuff," Christine explained to Harris. "But it still seemed like, you know, something was on his mind."

Christine did not want to fight with her boyfriend, so she jumped into her Geo Prizm and told Chris she'd take him to Seabrook, if that's what he wanted.

As they drove, he said, "You know what, um, don't go over to Seabrook. Take me to your homegirl's house or whatever, and I'll see if, uh, Marcus is there."

"Why? Why do you have to go there?"

"You know, I heard Marcus got some good shit."

Christine claimed that this statement upset her. They had been over at Marcus and Tiffany's a few weeks before that for Tiffany's birthday party. There was some indication here that Christine didn't appreciate Chris going over there, talking to Marcus and Tiffany, or, especially, Rachael, without her. She was jealous. Chris had admitted that he had hooked up with Marcus a few times after that party without her knowledge, and the thought of them together without her had infuriated Christine.

"Are you on that [stuff] now?" Christine asked Snider in the car. She assumed he had taken some pills back at the house-some of that "good shit," he was referring to-and she didn't like it.

Christine pulled her Prizm into the subdivision opposite the Millbridge Drive neighborhood where Tiffany lived, she told Harris. She parked down the street, sort of in back of Tiffany's house (although she never said why she did this).

"And he was like, 'Come on, come on.' Just like rushing me."

"What the hell, you know, what the hell have you got there. . . ?" Christine asked Snider as they sat in her car. He was in some sort of a daze, she claimed. "I thought, honestly, I know it sounds real stupid, I thought that maybe he had, you know, messed around with one of the girls or something, you know, and he wanted to see them or something."

So he'd ask his girlfriend, a good friend of both girls, to drive him over there? That didn't seem like too likely a scenario to Harris as he sat and listened. However, he allowed Christine to talk her way through her version of the day.

Christine wanted to start the car, do a K-turn, and hightail it out of the neighborhood.

"I'm late for work already," she told Snider.

Her shift had started at three o'clock. It was just after that hour.

Snider screamed "at me, you know, like messed-up crap."

"Get out," she yelled back. "Get out of this car! Go do what you want."

Snider slammed the door and started walking.

Christine said she sat and waited. "I just wanted to leave him there and go to work."

But she didn't. Instead, she waited.

At some point, though, she claimed she started the car, turned around, and started driving out of the neighborhood. Her home was a mere two miles away. Yet, instead of driving home, Christine said she pulled down Tiffany's street for some (unknown) reason and drove toward Tiffany's house, eventually parking her car nearby, a few houses down the block from it. The idea she was obviously trying to convey here to Harris was that Snider had gone into the house by himself, apparently to cop some drugs or to visit one of the girls he had a thing for, and she had decided to wait for him.

"And then I saw him, like, walking in the opposite direction of the house."

So she pulled up. Beeped the horn.

Chris hopped in. "Just drive, just drive! Come on . . . just drive," he said frantically. There was something different about him now, Christine claimed. He was all hyped up and anxious, more than usual. Totally flipping out, according to Christine's version.

"He looked at me with this look."

He pulled out a bag of drugs from his pocket, she said. "I was like, good. I thought he had hooked us up. But I know he didn't have the money for [the amount] that was there."

"I jacked dem fools! I jacked dem fools," Snider said as Christine drove. He flashed the drugs at her inside the car.

("I started freaking out, you know, because they knew me," Christine editorialized to Harris.) "Why did you do this?" Christine asked. "Why, Chris?"

Her boyfriend reached over and turned on the radio "really loud." Then he started screaming the lyrics to a song by the band Nine Inch Nails, yelling at the top of his lungs.

Christine turned the radio off, letting him know she didn't approve. She had never seen him like this.

He reached down and felt his leg near his shin. He uttered a stream of expletives and then said, "You gotta go back. Go back right now!"

"What?" she asked, startled.

"You gotta go back."

"No way."

"You don't know what happened. . . . Go back!"

"What did you do?"

"I forgot something. . . . I forgot something. You gotta go back. Right now!"

Why would he want to go back if he just jacked those people? Christine thought.

Against her better judgment, she turned around and drove back to Tiffany's house. "I was gonna, you know, just pull over in front of the house. 'Cause if I had to, you know, apologize for him, you know, he's gonna get his butt whooped."

"No, no, no," he said as she pulled up in front of the house. "What are you doing?"

"What are you talking about?"