Months passed.
Greg's family continued pushing for answers.
A reward was offered.
Detectives revisited interviews.
They examined his business relationships.
They reviewed hotel records.
Nothing explained the injuries.
Susie found the situation almost impossible to accept.
Her husband had entered a locked hotel room alive.
The following morning he was dead.
Doctors said he had suffered devastating trauma.
But nobody could explain where that trauma came from.
Eventually Susie encountered a magazine article involving a private investigator named Ken Brennan.
Brennan had previously worked in law enforcement and with the Drug Enforcement Administration before entering private investigative work.
The story convinced Susie that he might bring something the investigation desperately needed.
A completely fresh set of eyes.
She contacted him.
She described Greg's case.
The locked room.
The lack of blood.
The strange autopsy.
The absence of motive.
Brennan became interested.
He traveled to Beaumont.
Crucially, Detective Scott Apple did not treat him as an enemy.
Apple opened the investigation to him.
Crime-scene photographs.
Autopsy information.
Witness interviews.
Hotel records.
The two began reviewing the case together.
Brennan started with the photographs.
Greg on the floor.
The bed.
The cigarettes.
The ashtray.
The money.
The television.
He wanted to know what Greg had been doing in the final minutes before death.
He asked Susie a simple question.
Was Greg right-handed?
Yes.
Did he smoke with his right hand?
Usually.
Then why was the cigarette in his left?
Perhaps it meant nothing.
Perhaps Greg shifted hands.
But Brennan began imagining the final seconds differently.
Greg had been sitting on the bed.
Then something happened suddenly.
Something forced him upright.
He moved toward the door.
He collapsed.
The cigarette could have changed hands in confusion.
Then Brennan returned to the air conditioner.
Greg hated warm hotel rooms.
The air conditioner had failed.
Yet it had never been restarted.
Again, the implication was that something happened around the same period as the electrical interruption.
Greg did not continue his ordinary evening.
He did not calmly spend hours after being assaulted somewhere else.
Whatever happened likely happened right there.
Room 348.
But there was still no attacker.
Brennan began studying the room itself differently.
A hotel room is not isolated.
It shares a ceiling.
A floor.
Walls.
And one wall separated Room 348 from Room 349.
Brennan and Apple went back to the MCM Eleganté.
Many months had passed since the death.
Hundreds of guests may have occupied the rooms since then.
Housekeepers had cleaned repeatedly.
Maintenance work may have occurred.
Anything loose would almost certainly be gone.
Still, the walls remained.
Brennan looked closely near the connecting doorway.
There was a small indentation.
A dent in the drywall.
Nothing dramatic.
Hotels accumulate wall damage constantly.
Suitcases.
Furniture.
Door handles.
The simplest explanation was that the connecting door had hit the wall.
Brennan tested it.
He opened the door.
Then looked at where the handle lined up.
It missed the dent.
Several inches.
That tiny mismatch bothered him.
If the door did not make the mark, what did?
He and Apple entered Room 349.
They looked at the opposite side of the same wall.
There was a hole.
Small.
Round.
Poorly repaired.
Someone had tried to conceal it.
The material inside was not professional filler.
It appeared to be toothpaste and toilet paper.
Now the two defects were suddenly connected.
A hole in Room 349.
Damage on the Room 348 side.
Investigators carefully exposed the wall.
Then they used a laser.
The beam was projected through the holes.
Straight through the shared wall.
Into Room 348.
And toward the bed.
Toward the exact area where Greg had been sitting while watching television.
Everything changed.
The investigation had spent months trying to understand how an attacker entered Greg's locked room.
Perhaps no attacker entered.
Something else did.
Something capable of moving through drywall.
Something capable of producing catastrophic internal trauma in a fraction of a second.
A bullet.
Brennan and Apple returned to the autopsy.
The pathologist had diagnosed blunt-force trauma.
But if a projectile had crossed the hotel wall, Greg's body needed to be reconsidered with an entirely different assumption.
The medical examiner's photographs were reviewed.
A defect through Greg's internal organs suddenly looked different.
The damage to the heart looked different.
And most important of all, the unusual injury around Greg's groin no longer looked like the result of a kick.
The theory became startling.
A 9mm bullet had crossed from Room 349 into Room 348.
It had struck Greg in the scrotal region.
The folds of skin had made the entrance wound extremely difficult to recognize as a gunshot wound.
Then the projectile traveled upward through his torso.
Ripping through internal structures.
Damaging ribs.
Piercing organs.
Striking the heart.
The injuries that seemed like a savage beating had actually been produced by one bullet.
Suddenly the locked room was no mystery at all.
No killer opened the door.
No one needed to enter.
The bullet came through the wall.
Greg had been sitting on the bed.
He never saw whoever fired it.
He may never even have understood what happened.
He rose.
Tried to move toward the door.
Collapsed.
The door remained secured.
The room remained undisturbed.
The cash remained untouched.
The entire murder scene finally made sense.
But solving the physics created a new problem.
Room 349 had been occupied that night.
Police had already spoken to the men staying there.
And they had all said they knew nothing.
Now investigators knew that at least one of them had been only a few feet away when a 9mm bullet passed through the wall and killed Greg.
More disturbing still, someone had deliberately filled the bullet hole with toothpaste.
Which meant someone in Room 349 knew a gun had been fired through that wall.
Someone knew exactly what happened.
And for months, they had remained silent.