He drove to the Walgreens and dropped off his accomplice so she could make her shift.

  Christine walked into Walgreens and clocked in at 4:23 P.M. (she would clock out for a break at 6:59 and back in at 7:29 P.M., and clock out to go home at 10:35 P.M.); she put on her work apron, washed up in the restroom, and then stood behind the makeup counter, waiting for her first customer of the evening. She was nervous. But okay, considering what had happened.

  As Christine got settled behind the counter, she happened to look down.

  There were specks of blood underneath her fingernails.

  CHAPTER 41

  TIME. DETECTIVE BRIAN Harris knew all about it. Such an expressive word, something no one seemed to have enough of these days. Yet time, in its universal splendor, was about to take on new meaning for Harris as the winter of 2006 settled on Houston. Time magazine had interviewed Harris for an article about New Orleans transplants and the new (massive migratory) wave of crime HPD had contended with over the past six months post-Katrina. That article, in which Harris was quoted, on top of an award Harris had never asked or lobbied for but received, was about to cause the young, new sergeant a bit of a stir with some of his colleagues.

  Harris had been part of a team—the newly formed Gang Murder Squad—that had arrested eight men, all from New Orleans, suspects in eleven murders. It was a major accomplishment—something the department could be proud of amid all the bloodshed that had been spilled since Katrina.

  “Of twenty-three Katrina-related homicides in Houston, we linked nine to just two groups from New Orleans—the 3 ’n’ G and the Dooney Boys,” Harris told Time magazine. “You see a spike in homicides in New Orleans in July and August, then the hurricane comes and they are displaced to Houston and elsewhere.”

  Utter chaos was what the city of Houston had experienced. But Harris, along with scores of other good cops, had made an impact on the Katrina-related gang crime and murder, thwarting a solid portion of it all. In addition, many of the Katricians were heading back to where they lived, which was a blessing all by itself. Harris was proud of his men, himself, and anyone else who had helped. Why shouldn’t he be? Most in the Homicide Division (Harris included) were hardworking, type A, go-getter investigators who didn’t wait for an opportunity. This wave of crime had truly brought out the best in most everyone on the force.

  Although HPD now had somewhat of a handle on the Katrina cases, more murders and crimes were coming in every day. Things would settle down, and boom! Another crack dealer beat a lady of the night; another gang member took revenge on a young user who owed a debt; another turf war turned into carnage. And then every so often, Harris looked over to the side of his desk and the Clear Lake case stared back up at him.

  Oh, yeah . . . that.

  The case was continually poking at him. At this point he was by himself as far as investigating Clear Lake. Everyone else had been slammed with cases, on top of what had been that promised rash of Homicide Unit retirees. An additional blow weighing on Harris was that he had been voted supervisor of the year by the department in 2005. This did not sit well with some of the guys around him. One comment he heard from a particular cop was “A monkey could do this job” (meaning Homicide Division work).

  “Really?” Harris said. “You gonna call that guy”—he pointed to a Homicide cop with thirty-three years on the job—“a monkey after his three decades of service?” It was an insult. Personality reigned over principle, duty, and integrity. Some cops stood out on their own merits. Some jumped into the spotlight, brushing their hair first, shining their badge second. Some liked to voice their opinions. Harris was not one or the other; he did his job and let the chips fall.

  Every time Harris had a success, that same cop—the monkey comment guy—approached him and pointed to the Clear Lake boxes stacked up on the floor next to Harris’s desk.

  “If you’re such a hotshot, why can’t you solve that one?” the monkey comment guy said one day.

  “Buddy, if you think you’re big enough,” Harris responded, “why don’t you jump on board?”

  But maybe the guy was right, Harris thought on those days when things seemed to be too much. Was this case, now heading toward its three-year anniversary, ever going to be closed? Did it even have the potential anymore?

  The one positive the case had going for it was George Koloroutis; he was not going to allow his daughter’s murder to fall by the wayside. George had called Harris’s captain one day not too long after the second anniversary, when the Katrina crime exploded. “Look,” George had said, “the case has been bounced around, nobody taking any ownership. It’s been passed from one group to another, and the only one who has shown any interest lately is Harris. Can you at least allow him to stay on it until there’s some closure, or you guys know for sure that it just isn’t going anywhere?”

  A promotion within the ranks of law enforcement usually meant the guy or gal who received that promotion was transferred to a place in the department where he or she was going to be more useful. You didn’t want to promote an officer to sergeant and then allow him to stay in the same unit he had been in, obviously, for fear that he or she would show favoritism to those officers he or she had befriended while one of them. It is almost unheard of that an officer stayed within the same unit after a supervisory advancement.

  It was back at the promotion ceremony, Harris recalled, when one of the assistant chiefs from the department put into perspective how unique a situation Harris had found himself in. The assistant chief had made a comment to Harris regarding how rare it was in law enforcement circles that an officer who was promoted stayed in his unit. The assistant chief approached Harris after the ceremony concluded and stuck out his hand. “I need to shake the hand of the man who walks on water!”

  Harris was taken aback. “Excuse me?”

  “All I’m saying is a man would have to walk on water before his superiors would ever allow him to stay in the division.”

  CHAPTER 42

  NO ONE EXPECTED it to happen the way it did. But in the end, when you look at the ebb and flow of the investigation from an unbiased point of hindsight, you can truly see how the entire Clear Lake investigation led up to this one moment.

  It was 2:02 P.M. on July 8, 2006, ten days before the third anniversary of the murders. A call came into Crime Stoppers. Sergeant Eddie Diaz was manning the desk.

  “I overheard Christine Paolilla talking about the murders in Clear Lake, back in July ’03,” the tipster said. “Christine was in the Starlite rehab in Center Point, Texas, back in ’04 and I was in the same facility.”

  It’s important to note here that although the anonymous caller was male, it was not Justin Rott (as many would later speculate). Justin had never been in the Starlite Recovery Center, and at the time the call came in, he was actively using drugs with Christine, both embroiled in the disease of addiction on a level snowballing out of control.

  Diaz asked for more info.

  “She claimed that she helped her boyfriend commit the murders,” the male tipster continued. “I have no idea who the boyfriend is, but his name might have been Chris. Not sure. Christine, though, was a friend to one of the girls who was killed.”

  In a report of the call, HPD pointed out: The caller was very forthcoming, not shy, and didn’t express any fear.

  Christine Paolilla, apparently under the auspices of sobriety and maybe guilt, had opened up to the tipster. They were alone one afternoon in the rehab, sitting together, talking. Christine started the conversation by posing a shocking question to the tipster: “Have you ever killed anyone?”

  “No,” he said.

  What a damn thing to ask someone.

  “I did,” Christine said, as if proud she had it in her. “And it wasn’t something I thought I would ever do.”

  She proceeded to explain, in graphic detail, what had happened that day.

  “She and her boyfriend,” the tipster told Sergeant Diaz, “killed the four to get large amounts of money and X pills stashed in the home. She said they used a forty-five-caliber and nine-millimeter weapon. I [later] overheard her say that they got the guns from a safe inside the boyfriend’s father’s house. And she also said that the guns were put back inside the safe after the murders,” and her boyfriend had wiped both weapons clean of any prints.

  As the tipster talked through Christine’s confession, this new version added details to Justin’s description. For one, the tipster said Christine talked about her telling Chris Snider she thought they (Marcus and D) had a gun inside the house, and she didn’t, at first, want to go through with robbing them.

  “She said she got sick to her stomach while walking up to the house and lost her nerve.” But Chris Snider convinced her to go through with it. (A comment that spoke of premeditation.) “They then went . . . inside and opened fire.”

  Christine even gave particulars: “One male was shot on the sofa and died instantly.” She had no idea who shot whom. She didn’t know if she shot the girls, or if he shot the boys, because they fired at the same time, as soon as they entered the house. It sounded as though they rang the doorbell and barged in while unloading the chambers of their weapons. Shoot first, search for the drugs and cash after.

  Those kids never had a chance.

  “She also said that after leaving the scene, she became scared and worried that one of the victims could still be alive and that the surviving victim could ultimately identify her and her boyfriend. So she walked back into the house. I am not sure if the boyfriend went with her. But one of the victims was still alive, and this person was crawling on the floor. She was out of bullets and had to beat the victim to death with the [butt] of her gun.”

  (In a later version of this same moment, Christine said that Rachael, while crawling and pleading for her life, had her phone in her hand and was trying to dial 911, which ended up being consistent with Rachael’s bloody fingerprints found on the numbers 9-1-1.)

  The tipster spoke of Christine working at Walgreens; he said Christine and Chris changed clothes after the murders and “she went to work.” He had “no idea” where Chris and Christine might be these days; but the last he knew, Christine was at a halfway house in Kerrville, Texas.

  “She claimed to no longer be with the boyfriend . . . that he had moved somewhere in Kentucky, but he still calls her from time to time. She said he usually calls her to threaten her by telling her he will kill her if she ever tells anyone about the crime.”

  One of the most interesting aspects of the confession for police was that Christine had told the tipster, “After the shots they did not get hardly anything they wanted.” Christine and Snider had assumed that Marcus and D had a wad of money hanging around the house, along with a major stash of drugs. And this sort of pissed them off. They had killed four people, essentially, for nothing.

  The call into the Crime Stoppers tip line came in on a Saturday—and wouldn’t you know, Brian Harris was on vacation that week, out of touch until the following Monday morning.

  CHAPTER 43

  IT WAS JULY 11, 2006, before Brian Harris and his new partner, Detective Tom “TJ” McCorvey, were located. Harris was with McCorvey, it turned out. They were at a gas station fueling up.

  “Frank Poe from Crime Stoppers,” the caller said to Harris.

  “Yeah?” Harris said.

  Frank Poe explained the call Diaz had taken. Harris knew right there it was a turning point and the call that they had been waiting on all along. He could feel it. As Harris listened, the evidence left behind came to mind. It all backed up what the caller said.

  Harris got back into the car. Looked over at McCorvey. Turned the ignition key. “Hey, TJ, buckle up, partner—we’re in for a hell of a ride!”

  Yet, hearing that Crime Stoppers had taken a call about the Clear Lake case should not have been something to get too excited about. It’s safe to say that Harris had been jaded by this point and was not going to jump up on his feet and pump a fist because a tipster had phoned in.

  Tom McCorvey researched this new name connected to the Clear Lake case: Christine Paolilla.

  Christine had just turned twenty. Almost immediately, Chris Snider’s name came up as being connected to Christine. In the system it showed that Snider and Paolilla had been arrested together back in October 2003 “in the same part of town where the murders of Millbridge Drive took place.”

  A viable link . . . finally.

  What also showed up was that Christine had been ticketed several times while in Kerrville by law enforcement (Kerrville being another indicator that the tipster was accurate with his info). After that, McCorvey found out that Chris Snider had a Kentucky state identification number indicating that he had at one time been handled by Kentucky law enforcement. More info consistent with what the tipster had reported.

  It was all fitting together.

  Harris had a thought when he heard about all this new information: that tipster calling HPD back in 2005 and giving them Chris Snider’s name and his girlfriend as “Christine,” with no last name.

  Now it made sense.

  Harris went through the file and pulled out that photograph of Rachael and the other girl, the one who had Rachael’s panty band in her teeth. They now had a driver’s license file photo of Christine Paolilla.

  A match.

  The photo had been mislabeled.

  Damn it all.

  Harris called Lelah Koloroutis. He explained the photo of her sister and the girl he now knew to be Christine Paolilla.

  “Yeah, that’s Christine,” Lelah confirmed. “She and Rachael were friends. Rachael used to carry a photo of Christine in her wallet.”

  There was a photo in Rachael’s purse. Christine had written Rachael a note on the back.

  Damn we’ve had some crazy memories. . . .

  CHAPTER 44

  JUSTIN ROTT AND Christine Paolilla had found a new home at La Quinta Inn on the I-10 in San Antonio, not too far away from one of Justin’s suppliers. The hotel was nearly on the corner of Vance Jackson Road and the interstate. They had been there for about seven or eight months, paying for the room every two weeks by calling in a credit card. In fact, Christine was so terribly consumed by the drugs she was injecting, that since they had rented the room back in December 2005, she had never left it.

  “Not once,” Justin said later.

  Their life together—that love story they had both dreamt of and jumped into back in Kerrville, falling hard and marrying without giving sobriety a chance—had come down to eating boxes of Cheez-Its, packages of Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups, drinking bottled water and soda, along with $250 worth of heroin and $250 worth of cocaine (that “speedball”—the same deadly combination of poison that had killed actor John Belushi) per day. They were shooting $500 worth of drugs into their veins every day. Justin’s routine consisted of getting up, hitting the local gas station food mart across the street from La Quinta to purchase cigarettes, snack food, maybe a magazine, and then the ATM for their daily drug money.

  On the dresser next to the only bed in the room was a mishmash of used Reese’s wrappers, plastic cups, alcohol swabs, packages (empty and full) of Marlboro Reds, bottles of rubbing alcohol (it was always good to make sure you had a nice clean vein to tap so as not to get an infection), and over one hundred syringes, some ready to be booted, others used and tossed.

  Scattered on the floor around the bed were animal feces from the dog they kept in the room, alongside dirty clothes, towels with bloodstains, vomit, any number of bacteria, and plain old-fashioned garbage. This was what drugs did: sent you down on your knees to the lowest depths of hell. If they didn’t have a dwindling bank account (nearly tapped out now), both would have probably been homeless, living in Christine’s purple Prizm. The only difference between living on the street like the junkies they were and having a roof over their heads was some cash in the bank and several credit cards in Christine’s name.

  There was also a laptop computer in the room. And lo and behold, near this same time, George Koloroutis had taken a call from his source tracking the hits on the website he had put up with the Crime Stoppers number and the sketches: “There’s one address repeatedly hitting the site,” George was told. Every day. The same IP address, it would turn out, belonging to that computer in Christine and Justin’s hotel room.

  Christine Paolilla was getting high and visiting the site devoted to catching her.

  CHAPTER 45

  TOM MCCORVEY WAS a down-home Texas “country boy.” Called a “big muscle-type cowboy” by a colleague, McCorvey is that Texan with the unmistakable native drawl you recognize immediately if you’re not from the region. Tom liked to wear the finest clothes and always showed up to work wearing a tie. He bowled. He golfed. The kind of guy who takes care of his father, and still finds it within himself to refer to the old man who raised him as Daddy.

  Harris had a good partner in McCorvey. They made the perfect team, at least for this nagging Clear Lake case. And now, perhaps more than ever, Harris needed a cop like McCorvey by his side; someone he could bounce ideas off to see if he was being overzealous or heading down the right track.

  “I want to take a photo lineup to the Lackners,” Harris told McCorvey one day after the recent tipster phoned in. “What do you think?”

  Now was as good a time as any.

  McCorvey and Harris arrived at Michelle Lackner’s work with a female and male lineup of six photos each. They sat down. Michelle Lackner viewed the lineup. She took her time, studying each male suspect with guarded curiosity. Then she pointed to one particular photo.

  “That’s him,” she said, sure of herself.

  The photo was of Christopher Snider.

  Harris placed the female lineup in front of her.

  Michelle Lackner took her time again, studying each photo carefully.