"Are you sure you didn't kill anybody?"

"No," Snider yelled.

"Well, I don't know what's going on, but I need your Myspace password because you have where you're living on there." Brandee told him she'd delete the account herself; she knew he wouldn't be able to do it.

"I don't know what it is. . . . I don't know what it is," Snider said, referring to his password. He was freaking out.

Brandee had helped her brother set up the account. She remembered the password-BOOGER1-and got into the account. Then she handed the phone to her aunt, and the aunt spoke to Chris while Brandee went in.

Chris was going crazy. He knew that the police were on their way.

"No, [Haley's] not here. . . . I don't know what to do." His mind raced.

They talked a few moments more and hung up.

Brandee called back after she completed the computer task. Some time had passed. Maybe an hour or two.

"Where's my brother?" Brandee asked.

Haley had picked up the phone. "I don't know what the hell is going on," she said. "But Chris was running out of the house as I came in."

"Where did he go?"

"I have no idea. . . ."

"None?" Come on, Brandee wanted to say, you don't know where the hell your boyfriend went off to?

"No, but I can tell you that he took all of my prescription pills . . . but left three hundred dollars in cash, his cell phone, wallet, and everything else of his here."

This stunned Brandee. Stopped her in her tracks. She knew her brother-and also where he was going.

Game over, Brandee thought as she hung up with Haley.

For Chris Snider, Brandee later said, there was no way he could have come to the conclusion that at that time he could have sat down with police and maybe turned in Christine and told his side of the murder tale. There was no way Snider would have thought that far in advance, or decided on taking life without parole and giving the police Christine. He just didn't have the mind capacity, Brandee explained.

"He had a very childlike mind," Brandee said respectfully. There was a sadness in her voice toward a brother who never really seemed to find his way in life. Chris Snider was a guy who used drugs to fill a hole in his soul, compress any emotional pain, and stuff any feelings of inadequacy he had about himself into a ball, deep down. Chris never thought of himself as anybody, somebody, anyone, or someone. To him, he was nobody, a person whose life was nothing more than gray clouds. Getting up in the morning was a chore for Chris. Facing life was an uphill battle all the time. He was constantly running to stand still, going nowhere.

"You can see how he misspelled words," Brandee added, "in the letters he wrote. And the way he talked was kind of baby-fied."

Where this all came from was a mystery. Chris Snider and his sister had a good upbringing in a good home. They were loved. They loved their parents. They didn't get to know their biological father until they were both adults.

"And what a disappointment that was," Brandee said.

The guy was a drug addict and an alcoholic. There was no mystery where Chris had gotten that taste in his DNA for drugs; it had been inherited. But he had never grown up in a household environment strewn with drug use, abuse, yelling, and screaming. They were a happy family.

And now he was on the run-again. This time, Brandee feared, heading to a place where he would never have to chase the dragon or run from the police again. Christopher Snider was finished looking behind his back, his sister knew. As Brandee hung up the phone with Haley, she considered how he was going off like a wounded wild animal to die in the woods somewhere, alone-that is, if HPD didn't find him first.

CHAPTER 51.

NOT LONG AFTER Brandee Snider spoke to her brother, she looked out the window and saw a "huge SWAT van" backing up to the door of her aunt's apartment. From there, Brandee and her aunt watched "these militant cops" file out of the van as if they were zeroing in on a 9/11 suspect. One after the other, they jumped out of the van, Kevlar vests, rifles, goggles, just like at her parents' house in Louisville, under the impression that Chris Snider was hiding out in her aunt's home.

"Don't move!" the first cops in the apartment shouted.

Brandee and her aunt were not going anywhere.

They looked under mattresses, in closets, in drawers, everywhere.

"It was crazy," Brandee said.

When they were finished, one of the investigators pulled Brandee aside and told her that she was going to have to go with them "downtown."

"Whatever," she said.

"Let's go."

"Can I at least put on some deodorant and change my clothes?"

Silence. Then a wave of a pistol and nod of the head as an officer followed her into the bathroom first, her bedroom second.

This is nuts. . . . There must really be something going on here, Brandee thought as she got ready.

Once they got Brandee down to HPD, she was put in the box. Brandee thought she was going to be interviewed as part of the investigation into whatever her brother might have gotten mixed up with; but within a few moments, she realized that was not the case.

Brandee referred to the investigator who "interrogated" her ("I refuse to say 'interviewed,' that'd be way too nice," she stated later) as "some really sharp-dressed man."

According to Brandee, the detective told her, "Look, if you don't tell us the truth, the truth we already know, you will be charged as an accomplice and possibly be put in prison for life."

"What?"

The questioning soon turned to where Chris Snider might be and where they could locate him. Brandee gave up Haley's name. She said she hadn't spoken to her brother in some time. He might be on the run.

"I think [my boyfriend] made all this up about Chris to get back at us for what I did to him." Brandee told them all about the Myspace account, her brother saying "no" he didn't do what they were claiming he had done, and just about everything she could recall. Near the end of the "interview," Brandee took a deep breath and accepted the idea that maybe Chris had committed murder.

She told the officer, "If this is true, then my brother is dead."

It felt cold and numbing to say the words, but Brandee knew her brother.

"Christine Paolilla told us that you had something to do with this," one of the interviewing officers said, according to Brandee.

Brandee had no idea what they were talking about. She felt like a murder suspect. A criminal. Brandee was the first to admit she had some pockmarks and the police knew her name, but a quadruple murder?

Come on.

Brandee said HPD kept her under the light for six hours, questioning her about things she didn't know anything about. After repeatedly asking her what amounted to the same series of questions, Brandee giving them the same answers, "they realized," she recalled, "that I didn't know anything. Then they typed up a statement, had me sign it, and took me back to my aunt's house."

In defense of HPD, they had four dead people, a case that was three years old, the end in sight: it was unfortunate that Brandee Snider had to be subjected to such rigorous questioning, but if it could help solve this case (and maybe save her brother from hurting himself), it was part of the process.

Brandee's mom called from Kentucky after hearing what had happened. "If you want to come out here to Kentucky, I'll send you a plane ticket."

Brandee said, "Yes. Yes."

CHAPTER 52.

ONE STORY CHRISTINE Paolilla failed to share with Brian Harris-or anyone else-as she began to talk about her role in what had happened on July 18, 2003, took place the day after the murders. She was at Chris Snider's parents' home in Crosby, Texas.

There was a part of Christine that viewed her relationship with Chris Snider as a "Bonnie and Clyde" type of romance, both of them connected by the crimes they had committed together. Some later said Christine had planned the murders of her friends so she and Chris could have this one interrelated bond between them that Snider could not sever-the ultimate secret, in other words, keeping him from ever walking out on her, like she presumed everyone else throughout her life had done.

Some evidence pertaining to this theory was the fact that Christine and Chris were routinely taking off to Walmart or another retail store with a strategy to rob the place. Snider later reported that during one afternoon postmurder, he and Christine took a trip to Walmart (she always drove; Snider never owned a car) and boosted two DVD players. They went back. Christine became manic inside the store, as if she was in her element, an elated state of grace to steal. She loved it. "Hey, babe," she'd said to him while they were walking through the CD section. "Come here." Chris walked over. Christine took a quick look around. Then, happy no one was watching, she stuffed his pants with CDs, laughing. There was a glistening look in her eyes.

The ultimate heist, though, took place on July 18, something both Chris and Christine could not help but to boast about twenty-four hours later. Brandee Snider was at home on this day, July 19, sitting on her bed inside her room. She heard her brother and Christine stumble into the house loudly, as they often did, making their presence known to anyone around.

Next thing Brandee knew, the door to her bedroom was flung open. There stood Christine and her brother, ear-to-ear grins on their faces. Chris was holding something.

"Look . . . what . . . we . . . have," Christine said proudly, a look of euphoria on her face. Certainly not the dark and troubled gaze of someone who was overwhelmed by the fear of watching her boyfriend kill four people, worried he was going to kill her and her family (as she had said repeatedly in the months afterward).

Chris raised his eyebrows.

Christine now held the bag-the size of a pillowcase-full of pills.

"X," one of them said. "An entire bag of X."

Thousands upon thousands of dollars' worth of the drug.

Brandee flipped out. Jumped up off her bed. "There's only one way, Chris, that you could have gotten this." Brandee was upset and angry. She didn't understand what her brother wanted with all those drugs, enough to put him in jail for decades.

Chris and his girl stepped into Brandee's room, closing the door behind them. Chris knew his sister. She couldn't keep anything from their mother. She was honest like that, to the core. She would tell. But he went ahead, anyway, and showed her the bounty he and Christine had just burgled.

"What is all this? Are you guys crazy?"

They smiled over such a huge score.

"What do you think?"

"You've got to get rid of that right now," Brandee said.

"Come on," Chris told his girlfriend. He took the bag and walked toward the bathroom. "We're flushing it."

"What?" Christine responded, shocked. "No, Chris. No."

Brandee stood by as her brother flushed the pills, handful by handful, down the toilet, the clear water spiraling dollar bills into the city sewer system. This was a major hurdle for Snider to overcome in the relationship, family members later said. For Chris to turn and tell Christine what they were going to do (especially with drugs) was out of character for him.

Later, Brandee found out that she should have stayed and watched them flush it all, because she heard from her brother that they had flushed only half of the bag and kept the rest.

CHAPTER 53.

DURING HIS FIRST interview with Christine Paolilla, Detective Brian Harris felt that she was placing the onus of the murders entirely on the back of her accomplice, Chris Snider. The young woman took no responsibility whatsoever for anything having to do with killing Rachael, Tiffany, Marcus and Adelbert. In fact, per Christine's version of that afternoon's events, she had never even gone into the Rowell house. Yet, Harris was not going to accept Christine's story at face value. He knew from her posture and demeanor, as she talked her way through the murders, along with the interviews he had conducted throughout the case, and the interview going on across the hall with Justin Rott, that Christine was lying. She was trying to pull one over on HPD and remove all of her culpability for this horrendous crime.

"Christine," Harris said at one point, repeating himself for what to him seemed like the umpteenth time, "in order for mercy to work, I need to have complete honesty from you."

Christine stared at him blankly, her leg bouncing nervously, a bite of her lower lip. She was undoubtedly scrubbing through her options-all of which were just about running out.

"Christine, what did he say he did with the guns? He would have had that conversation with you. What did he say he did with them?"

The suspect stammered. Harris had her on the ropes.

"I don't . . . I-I . . . don't . . ."

"Christine?"

"I don't know. He did not . . . I swear!"

"Whose guns are they?"

"I guess they're his dad's."

They went back and forth. Christine, in a desperate attempt to plead her case, tried to absolve herself. But Harris could see that her story was falling apart.

"Why didn't you go to the funerals?" Harris asked out of nowhere, trying to catch her off guard.

"I don't like going to funerals. . . . Anything, I don't . . . ," Christine said, dredging up some tears, mentioning that now tired story of her dad dying when she was two years old, and how funerals brought all that pain up for her.

Harris shifted in his seat, thought for a brief moment, and then broke into the "Prodigal Son" story from the Bible. He explained to Christine that her life story reminded him a lot of the bad son in that popular Bible tale. The bad son had squandered all of his inheritance on partying and on the luxurious and wasteful things life had to offer during the days of Jesus Christ. It was a good analogy, probably perfect in the situation that Christine had found herself sitting in, having blown through-in $500-a-day increments-close to a quarter of a million dollars that the death of her father had given her. It was almost laughable to watch her sit there and cry about a father she never knew, a man who had died when she was barely old enough to walk and not yet out of diapers. She was crying, allegedly, for this young child who she once was, but blowing all of the money, which his death had given her, on heroin and cocaine didn't seem to make one bit of difference.

Most human beings, Harris noted aloud, when confronted with a traumatic/criminal situation in which they played a role, generally tried to minimize their part in order to allow themselves to feel better, to make a nice cushion for mercy to fall upon. That, Harris said, wasn't the right road to travel if Christine's goal by sitting and talking to HPD was to acquire redemption and, hopefully, be shown some mercy for doing so. If Christine wanted to redeem any part of her involvement in this evil act, the murders "that bastard," Harris called Chris Snider, had committed "all by himself," Christine was not going about it in the right way. She needed to provide him with details, Harris said rather loudly. Christine and Chris had been together for months after the murders, Harris knew. They had spoken on the phone routinely after the murders. Throughout that time, Harris pointed out, again and again, they had talked about the murders. If Chris Snider had gone into that house by himself, how in the world did Christine know all these details she had given to her husband and to others?

"Because," Harris added near the end of his little "Prodigal Son" rant, "nobody can open up their arms to you, Christine !"

And on that note, Harris stressed, her time was running out.

Now or never.