“You’re drunk,” Brennan told him. “I suggest you call your fuckin’ attorney.”

Case Closed

Brennan was worried when the judge started reading the sentence. He had flown to Beaumont on October 29, 2012, to join Susie Fleniken and Scott Apple and a group of Greg’s family and friends for the sentencing of Lance Mueller. The electrician had entered a no-contest plea to manslaughter. As Brennan remembered it, the judge began by saying that this whole tragedy might be seen just as a terrible accident.

Oh, fuck, thought Brennan. Here it goes. Don’t tell me this guy is going to get a year or something.

But then the judge started cataloguing the long list of willfully irresponsible choices that had led to this day.

More like it, thought Brennan.

The judge gave Mueller 10 years, half of what the law allowed. The apology Mueller offered in court, no matter how sincere, came way too late. There was his criminally irresponsible decision to drunkenly play with the gun. As Steinmetz had said, they had suspected from the start that the errant bullet had at least helped kill the man in Room 348. Even a heart attack, which had been the first assumption as the police rolled his body out on a gurney, might have been triggered by the gunshot. Then, after the coroner had ruled that Greg had died of blunt-force trauma, Mueller was happy to accept that something might have crushed him to death, even if it was hard to imagine what. Still, he had been worried enough about the gunshot. He had himself patched the hole with toothpaste. He had hidden the gun immediately in his car, then stashed it with a friend for the first few days after the incident, and had then handed it over to an attorney for safekeeping before he left Texas.

What a huge mistake. If he had come forward at any time prior to Brennan and Apple’s solving the mystery, which had taken about eight months, it is unlikely he would have been charged with manslaughter, much less have gone to jail. Mueller had gambled from the start that whatever connection he had to Greg’s death would never be discovered. The odds in his favor were good, too. As it was, even after the connection was made, the county district attorney’s office had been reluctant to prosecute the case as a felony.

Brennan had turned that idea around. When he found out that the prosecutor might opt for a plea deal, he flew to Beaumont and joined a meeting between Apple and Paul Noyola, an investigator for the D.A.’s office. Noyola explained that accidental gun discharges in Texas were not uncommon, and that juries and judges tended to understand them, and that … well, the whole issue of accidental deaths was a fairly gray area of the Texas criminal code. In other words, the whole thing was looking like more of a hassle than a slam dunk.

The private detective was indignant. He arranged to bring Susie Fleniken to Beaumont for a meeting with the assistant D.A. in charge of the case. Among other complications, the A.D.A. told them, Mueller’s gun was still locked in the lawyer’s safe, and the lawyer was making noises about fighting efforts to have it turned over.

“I suggest you go down there with a search warrant and a fuckin’ blowtorch and go get the fucking weapon!,” Brennan said. “It’s evidence of a capital crime. What the fuck are you talking about?” Brennan was pretty worked up. Here’s what he remembers saying:

“The victim was important to everybody here,” he said, gesturing around the table. “And we’re not going to let this thing be brushed under the rug, let somebody take a plea on this. This is not a fucking accident. An accident is when somebody comes in, has taken off their gun, their gun discharges, and, God forbid, somebody is hit. . . . That’s one thing. It’s completely different when somebody fuckin’ brings a gun that they shouldn’t have into another fuckin’ state, shitfaced drunk, fucking around with a gun. The people with him realize that something bad could happen. . . . He discharges a round. Almost kills the guy he’s with. And then he does kill somebody on the other side of the wall. He knows that’s something that could happen; it’s an occupied hotel. He doesn’t even bother to knock on the door next door to see if anybody’s hurt. And after that, his answer to the whole thing is to go get drunk some more in the fucking bar of the hotel? And then when he sees a body being taken out the next day, and he is 100 percent certain he killed somebody, he decides not to say anything about it but run to his attorney and leave the fucking weapon in a safe, and the fucking attorney doesn’t say anything about it, either? You know what that is? That’s fucking murder. So if you think we’re going to forget about this fucking thing, think again. Because that ain’t fuckin’ happening.”