"All right," Harris said, "I figured that, okay. But how would we explain a smudge mark on her clothing? On Rachael's shoulder, all right, and, um, and it kind of makes sense now, okay, a foreign hair." He was trying to say they had uncovered a hair in the living room. "A lot of times when we're being hit, we do this"-Harris put his hands over his head like he was protecting himself from falling debris-"and we cover our head." He was mimicking what Rachael was likely doing when Christine went back into the house and beat her to death with the butt end of the weapon Chris Snider had given her.

All Christine said in reaction to that was: "Uh-huh."

Then Harris switched tactics. In a comforting tone, coming across to Christine as someone who was on her side, protecting her, the detective said, "See, what I mean is, how would we explain that [hair] being on or about Rachael? See, I don't want you to get jammed up-see what I mean?"

Whenever he said "we," it took the "you"-that accusatory finger being pointed at Christine-out of it, and placed Christine in charge of her own destiny, all with the feeling that Harris and the HPD were her allies. It was a smart strategy. Become her friend and she would, sooner rather than later, trip over herself. From the littlest differences in her stories, Harris could tell that Christine was making this up as she went along. Liars, he knew from experience, always expose themselves by the sheer process of telling more lies.

Christine said something Harris couldn't understand. Then, "We shared clothes," meaning she and Rachael. "I don't know if that would have anything to do with it."

Harris next talked about oils on the skin. How, per se, if Christine had placed her hand over his hand, she would, effectively, sandwich the oils he had on his skin and seal them to his skin, concluding, "How do we explain your oils being on those guns we recovered in Kentucky? See what I mean?"

"In Kentucky?" This was surprising to Christine. A big uh-oh.

"Yeah."

"I never been to Kentucky."

"No? I know you have never been to Kentucky. But how do we explain your oils on that gun?"

"There was oils on the gun?" Christine felt the itchiness of that noose scratching.

"In other words, all that stuff you see in CSI about dipping into bleach, about wiping it down? It's like when you melt a piece of cheese, right? Does the cheese go away? No. It sears into the bread, right? It's the same thing with body oils. That's why CSI's a joke, okay? It seals things in, okay? There were attempts by Chris to, number one, wipe it down, to get them off so his dad wouldn't know it-"

"Okay," Christine said. She was paying careful attention to what Harris was saying.

"-but those oils sear in, see, okay? At what point in time, did you touch those weapons?"

"Um . . ."

"You got to explain that."

"When I was in my car that day, we were fighting and-"

"Okay, tell me about that."

"I never, you know, grabbed the gun from him, you know, like there was only one that I saw."

"Tell me about it."

"Then I was, like, all, 'Get out of my car.' Like, 'I need to go to work.' I just wanted to go to work, to get away from him. At the time I wasn't even really thinking. I was, you know, I was just-I just wanted him to leave."

They had hit a critical point of the interview. Harris knew he had Christine in a tight spot. Truth was, they had not even caught up with Chris Snider yet. Word was coming back that no one could find him. Harris was involved in putting a team together to begin the hunt for Snider, once he was able to secure Christine's extradition to Houston.

In responding to how her oils might have gotten on the guns, Christine made up a story about how she and Snider got into a fight inside the car, and that possibly she grabbed hold of his jacket, where he was storing the weapon (which she had earlier said he had stored in the pant leg pocket of the parachute pants he was wearing that day), and she might have inadvertently touched the gun. As far as when and where, exactly, this took place, or what was said as they fought, she couldn't recall.

Harris changed the subject. He asked about "any specific detail" Snider might have told her about the actual murders and how the argument between him and the boys had started and then turned into bloodshed.

She said something about Chris "trying to act cool" while he was inside the house, and Marcus picked up on it and they started to have words.

She could know that only if she was inside the house herself, Harris thought, staring at Christine.

Harris asked if she had heard anything while she was outside sitting in the car, you know, like gunshots?

She said she didn't hear anything. A neighbor, though, Harris knew, one house away, down the block, had heard the shots, loud and clear. How was that possible?

They discussed the murders a bit longer. Christine did not really add anything more to what she had said already, besides offering up a few names of dopers that Chris knew from Seabrook, one being "Jason Uolla."

Interesting, Harris thought.

When Harris made a mistake and called one of Chris's friends by a different name, Christine laughed at the error. Amazing that she could find humor in all that was going on.

Harris asked about the supposed "special relationship" Christine might have had with Rachael.

"It was nothing," Christine said.

After that, they discussed a few inconsequential items, and Harris ended the interview, saying that the batteries in his recorder were running out of juice.

Christine could breathe easy; she had gotten through a second interrogation without giving herself up. As Harris considered things, however, he knew she was holding back.

"She was cunning. She tried to explain away everything, which told me that any 'withdrawal' from drugs was not affecting her ability to try and save her own ass."

AS THE LEAD investigator, Detective Sergeant Brian Harris now faced the problem of getting Christine Paolilla back to Houston, where he could continue to work on obtaining a confession. Harris knew she was there, inside the house, and quite possibly had pulled the trigger herself. He just needed Christine to tell him that. The San Antonio Police Department, nevertheless, needed to release Christine first, which would take a visit in front of a magistrate. All HPD had was a probable cause warrant to hold her.

As they prepared Christine for her appearance in front of the magistrate, Harris later said, he was stopped by one of the San Antonio police officers who had helped them bust in and take Justin and Christine into custody.

"You can't take her out of here. We need confirmation from your court that this is a valid warrant."

"Come on. Are you serious?"

The officer could have allowed them to take her without a hassle.

The idea was to place Christine in front of a San Antonio judge, who would then order her held on probable cause for an additional day or more, which would allow HPD to transport her back to Houston. It was supposed to be a simple court appearance.

But San Antonio was not going to release her that easy.

Tom McCorvey stepped up in front of the officer's face: "Are you crazy?"

Both men squared off. They stood in the hallway outside the court. Christine was just about on her way into the courtroom.

Harris stepped back, got on his cell, and called his boss.

"Look, whatever you guys do, when the judge is finished with her, do not allow them to put her back into a San Antonio jail. You grab her and you go. Got it?"

McCorvey was explaining to the San Antonio officer, who had made it clear that things needed to be done by the book, that all they wanted to do was take her back to Houston and get her out of San Antonio's hair. But the guy, an old Texan lawman who appreciated jurisdiction values and apparently busting the chops of outside departments, wasn't going to allow it until the proper warrant was signed.

Harris told McCorvey what their boss had said.

Meanwhile, the officer McCorvey was going head-to-head with realized that McCorvey, who is quite a bit bigger than most men, was not someone you necessarily wanted to aggravate to the point of boiling over. Thinking more about it, the officer said, "You know what. That's fine. Y'all are on your own here, though."

Harris needed directions to the small airstrip where a state police plane was supposed to be meeting them. They had no idea how to get there.

"On your own" meant exactly that: San Antonio was not going to lift a finger.

Thus, as soon as the judge finished, Harris and McCorvey, along with Breck McDaniel, grabbed Christine and got her into a waiting car, where they proceeded to inch their way to the airstrip with directions from the state police.

McDaniel drove the car back to Houston. The flight for Harris, McCorvey, and Christine was long, hot, and bumpy. They were flying into a wind so powerful the entire way home, Harris said, they could have gotten there sooner if they had driven.

Harris sat on one side of the small cabin; Christine cuddled up next to him. McCorvey was perched on the opposite side, facing them. It was cramped, the size of a small closet. Christine thought the ride was "neat" at first, looking out the windows like a kid, smiling, saying, "Wow, look at that . . ." Then she sat back and fell asleep as the plane leveled off, her head falling on Harris's shoulder.

McCorvey looked at the two of them and laughed. "Y'all make a cute couple."

Harris rolled his eyes. "Yeah, right."

"Love that drool running down her mouth and onto your shoulder."

"What?" Harris said, looking at the wet spot growing on his shirt. "Son of a bitch."

CHAPTER 55.

BACK IN HOUSTON, the team felt a bit more comfortable and confident that Christine, now near her mother, would open up. On Thursday, July 20, 2006, Breck McDaniel drove to the Harris County Jail, where Christine was being held, and signed her out.

Christine was brought to the courtroom of municipal judge Gordon Marcu, who officially read Christine her rights and let her know that she was being held for an additional thirty-six hours. If the DA did not charge her by the end of that time, there was the chance that she could be set free.

After that, McDaniel drove Christine to HPD headquarters, but first, per her request, stopped at McDonald's so she could get, of all things, a Happy Meal.

"Sit in there and eat," McDaniel said while walking Christine into the box. He mentioned he'd be back to speak with her after she was finished.

"Can I smoke when I'm done?"

"Yes."

As Christine ate her Happy Meal and thought about what she was going to say, the idea that Chris Snider was the master manipulator behind the murders became the focal point. In going down this road, she was making Snider out to be perhaps smarter than he actually was, thus creating a bit of a quandary for herself. Christine didn't know it, obviously, but she was about to bury herself with her latest round of innuendo and weak accusations. Number one, she had wanted nothing more than to be as close to Chris as possible when she was with him. The evidence would prove that she often used family members to get there. She had never even hinted at the idea that Chris was some sort of rough, abusive, controlling maniac, who was driving the relationship, several of Snider's relatives later said. In fact, from the outside looking in, things appeared quite the contrary.

"Christine realized how close Chris and I were," Brandee Snider later said, "and she would routinely try to be my best friend. She made me collages of Courtney Love and Bettie Page on her computer. . . . She always came over to the house with little gifts for me."

It was Christine's way of staying as close as she could to Chris, watching his every move. If she got in good with the sister, she was certain to be loved by him.

More than that, Chris Snider hadn't always been a dark, twisted, wounded soul, out drifting aimlessly in a world of violence and drugs. ("Look, I know Chris wasn't even close to perfect," Brandee recalled. Still, her brother did have moments of humanity and humor.) When Brandee was a high-school freshman involved in the drama club at Clear Lake High and her class had been assigned the task of making a music video, Chris offered to help. There were four girls at her house one afternoon doing the Spice Girls, hamming it up for the camera. "It was so funny," Brandee said. "I asked Chris to join us. My class ended up enjoying him the most because he had makeup on and was eating a corn dog throughout the whole video."

This was the goofy, happy-go-lucky side of Chris Snider. His sister started playing guitar when she was fourteen. She and Chris cowrote a song called "Doggie Food."

"We had a lot of fun when we did hang out. It sucks to remember good memories-those hurt more than the bad ones."

Now, after finishing her hamburger and fries, Christine Paolilla was ready to talk about what she warned was a far different side of Chris Snider, a man, she would soon assert, who would have killed her if she had not participated in that violent quadruple murder three years ago.

CHAPTER 56.

THERE WAS A bump in the road on the way to getting Christine to open up about the murders. It was 11:38 P.M. before Breck McDaniel sat down with Christine to interview her for what was now the third time (HPD interviewed her briefly in the hospital). By this point Christine was nowhere near out of the woods as far as her addiction. She had spent a better part of the night (after vomiting and suffering through the shakes and shivers) at the hospital ER engaged in withdrawal symptoms. But after nurses provided her with the proper meds, she said she was fine, and the hospital discharged her.

Back at HPD, near midnight, Christine was "lucid," Breck McDaniel noted in his report. He observed that she "understood her rights" and she didn't display any signs of "health problems" or "discomfort" as the interview got under way. She was not going through withdrawal symptoms. Christine was, instead, able and quite willing to talk. McDaniel had gotten out of her earlier in the night that she was ready to begin talking about what truly had taken place inside the Millbridge Drive house. No more BS. No more dancing around the truth. She wanted to explain her role.

Sitting on a chair in the box, her legs crisscrossed underneath her butt, staring at the floor, Christine began by framing Chris Snider as an angry monster of a human being whom she had been tied to at the hip and could not manage to wiggle away from.

"There were times when, um, he was almost satanic when talking about people, like, 'I wonder what it would be like to kill someone,' or 'I wonder what it'd be like to die.' "

She called it a "love-hate relationship," placing the liability of what was certainly to be a death penalty murder case entirely on her lover's shoulders. By now Christine was under the impression that Chris was in custody and talking about her, telling HPD everything. She had no idea HPD was, as she sat telling her version of the events, scrambling to find him.

Christine tried to play off the idea that Chris Snider had taken over the role of a father figure in her life (though he was only two years her senior) and filled a void she felt from not having a disciplinarian to teach her the value of right and wrong. The way she outlined it, Snider had poisoned her sense of morals and taught her how to be bad, how to hate. She claimed he became the "dominant male" in her life. She said he was able to influence every decision she made. She went on dissing Snider so brazenly and repeatedly that Detective McDaniel had to ask her to move on and begin talking about what happened. The more she downplayed her role in the relationship and tried to portray Snider as an evil, violent boyfriend who would stop at nothing to keep her, the more her argument came across as transparent. Truly, you could only trash a person so much before it became a mishmash of words and accusations that sounded weaker with each new allegation that was piled on.

"Can we move forward?" McDaniel encouraged.

After settling down, Christine told the same story of asking Snider to stop smoking weed at her parents' house on that July 18, 2003, afternoon-and her falling and hitting her head on the marble outside after he shoved her.

She described what she wore. (Walgreens made her wear "black pants and a dark blouse and black boots.") She explained what he looked like, and what color shirt he had on that day (black).

After a few more minutes of the same reasons she had given Brian Harris for ditching a Seabrook drug connection in lieu of going to the house of her "homeboys" to buy some drugs, Christine said they went to Tiffany's, but she "didn't feel like going in." So she told Chris to go get the stuff and meet her outside. She assumed he was going in to purchase the drugs, not rob them.

When he came out "ten minutes later," Christine explained, he was stoked and running on adrenaline, having just stolen "a sandwich-sized bag of X." There had been no shots fired. No dead people. No scrambling to get away from the scene.

Not at that time, she claimed.

The story up to this point was nearly identical to what she had told Harris, save for a few new details. When Snider admitted to her inside the car that he had robbed Marcus's pills, she felt like running into the house to "tell Rachael"-who she said in a previous interview did not live there at the time-"I had nothing to do with it. . . ."

The question McDaniel asked himself as she talked was what many would later wonder: How would she know Rachael was inside the house? She had given part of herself away here by mentioning that small fact of Rachael being inside the house. She could have never known that, unless she had been inside the house herself.

McDaniel made a note of that in his head and told her to move on.

After arguing with Snider about stealing from her friends, she said she convinced him to walk back up to the house with her, go in, and talk about what he had done. Maybe he could apologize and it would all be forgotten.

Christine knocked on the door and Rachael answered. Snider hadn't, by then, killed anyone. According to this new version, all he had done while inside was brandish his weapon and take the drugs. Christine claimed that she was under the impression they were going back to return the drugs and say how sorry she was for what he had done.

Rachael was upset because of what Snider had done. She opened the door, saw them, but then turned and walked away, almost as a diss.

Snider walked in, Christine said. She followed. She was nervous. She didn't want to make any problems with her friends. She knew how pissed Marcus was going to be; he and Adelbert would want to retaliate. This was going to be her chance to make it all right again.

"I was so scared, you know, I thought-I thought that, you know, like he (Snider) was gonna shoot me."