Investigators returned to the men connected to Room 349.
Lance Mueller.
Timothy Steinmetz.
Trent Pasano.
The original interviews now looked completely different.
Before, police had asked whether they knew anything about a dead man next door.
Now the questions would be specific.
Was there a gun?
Was it fired?
Who fired it?
Why was the wall repaired?
Before confronting them directly, Brennan and Apple spoke with coworkers and acquaintances.
One man remembered something Mueller had said after Greg's death.
Aaron Bourque recalled Mueller mentioning that a gun had gone off inside the hotel room.
Then, the next morning, a dead man had been removed from the room beside theirs.
That was the opening investigators needed.
They traveled to Wisconsin.
Steinmetz was interviewed.
Initially, he repeated the old story.
Nothing happened.
Nothing unusual.
He knew nothing about Greg's death.
Investigators allowed him to commit to the denial.
Then they changed the conversation.
They told him they knew about the gun.
They knew about the bullet hole.
They knew his story was false.
The longer he continued lying, the worse his own legal situation might become.
Steinmetz finally broke.
The story that had been hidden since September 2010 began coming out.
The men had been drinking.
A lot.
At some point, Lance Mueller wanted a handgun brought up.
A 9mm Ruger.
The gun was loaded.
Mueller began handling it.
Not defensively.
Not because someone was attacking him.
According to later accounts, he began fooling around with it.
Quick-draw motions.
Pointing.
Playing with a loaded weapon.
At one point the gun was directed toward Steinmetz.
He ducked.
Mueller then moved the weapon toward Pasano.
The gun discharged.
One explosive crack.
For an instant, Pasano thought he had been shot.
He had not.
The bullet passed him.
Then entered the wall behind him.
Silence.
A hole was visible.
The round had gone into the neighboring room.
Room 348.
This was the moment when an accident could have become an emergency response.
Someone could have called the front desk.
Someone could have knocked on Greg's door.
Someone could have dialed 911.
Someone could have said:
A loaded handgun just discharged into an occupied hotel room.
Instead, the men focused on the hole.
The evidence.
The gun.
Mueller removed or moved the weapon.
The hole was concealed.
Toothpaste.
Toilet paper.
Whatever was available.
Make the wall look intact enough that no one would immediately ask questions.
According to later reporting, the men knew someone was staying in Room 348.
They had heard Greg earlier.
At some point, they believed they heard coughing or another sound from the neighboring room.
That apparently reassured them.
Maybe the bullet had missed.
Maybe everything was fine.
But they never checked.
They never knocked.
They never asked hotel security to make sure the neighbor was alive.
They never called an ambulance.
Instead, Mueller and Steinmetz eventually went downstairs.
They continued drinking.
On the other side of the wall, Greg had been struck through the lower body.
The projectile traveled upward.
His organs were badly damaged.
His heart was injured.
Some medical estimates suggested he may have survived for a period after the shot, although precisely how long remains uncertain.
Whatever the interval, Greg appears to have gotten up.
He moved toward the hotel door.
He did not make it.
He collapsed face down.
His cigarette remained with him.
The television continued playing.
The room warmed as the air conditioner stayed off.
And no one came through the door.
The next morning, Greg's coworkers arrived.
Hotel staff opened Room 348.
Police were called.
As investigators waited in the corridor, there was a moment Detective Apple would remember much later.
Mueller and Steinmetz appeared in the hallway.
Apple made casual conversation.
Mueller said he had been doing better until then.
At the time, it meant almost nothing.
A guest watching police remove a body from the neighboring room might naturally be uncomfortable.
But now Apple understood that Mueller was standing only feet away from the wall he knew had been penetrated by a bullet.
He knew a gun had gone off.
He knew someone had died next door.
And he still did not tell police.
The investigators now understood the whole sequence.
Greg had not been targeted.
There was no motive because he was not the intended victim.
The men in Room 349 apparently had no meaningful relationship with him at all.
He happened to be sitting in the wrong place on the other side of thin hotel drywall.
The bullet passed through.
The rest was fear and concealment.
But investigators were not finished.
They still needed to determine who bore legal responsibility.
The shot itself appeared accidental.
The handling of the weapon was not.
And the decision not to seek help afterward was separate from the accident itself.
The case had changed from mysterious homicide to reckless firearm death.
Attention turned toward Mueller.
He had been the one handling the Ruger.
He had been drinking.
He had pointed it around the room.
The weapon discharged while he controlled it.
Now a grand jury and prosecutors would have to decide what crime that amounted to.
But for Greg's wife, another question was becoming more painful than the criminal charge.
If the men had simply knocked on Room 348 immediately after the shot, could Greg have survived?
No doctor could give her a certain answer.
His injuries were severe.
But there may have been time.
And the possibility that help could have reached him while he was still alive changed the meaning of everything that happened after the gun went off.
The bullet may have been an accident.
What the men did next was not.