by Mark Bowden
And she was right. The DEA had given Apple the wrong printout. The one from Greg’s device held no surprises. He was, it seems, exactly the man he appeared to be. Apple was back where he had started.
Who doesn’t love a mystery solved? It creates order from disorder, salves our ache for moral balance. An unsolved case is like a stone in your shoe—it just rubs and rubs. The work becomes drudgery. All paths suggested by the evidence become familiar and fruitless. This is where the case of the body in room 348 was by the end of 2010. Scott Apple was stymied. He had plenty of more pressing and promising work on his desk. Still, he talked often on the phone to Susie and to Greg’s brother. He was sympathetic and open to anything they suggested. Hoping to unearth something new, the family put up a $50,000 reward. It produced nothing. Then Michael hired a private detective from Houston, a former FBI man. Apple happily met with the man and reviewed the case with him. That was the last he saw of him. The guy would call from time to time to ask Apple if he had anything new. From Apple’s perspective, the guy was just taking money from the victims. Susie went to a well-known medium—“It was not inexpensive,” she later told me—and Apple obligingly parked his skepticism, took notes, and did what he could to follow up, even though he did not believe in supernatural detection, and the scenario the psychic delivered, involving a group of Mexicans in a car, was a distinctly unoriginal thesis in Texas law enforcement. Still, how could Apple be dismissive at that point? Especially after he had raised with Susie the hurtful and bogus suspicion of prostitutes and then had to admit his mistake? She was fed up with him, and he knew it. She considered him and the rest of his department to be amateurs. And how could he argue with that? He had nothing.
The matter of Greg Fleniken was bound for the cold-case files. It would be just another sad box of notes and evidence stored in the Jefferson County Court House.
Ken Brennan took Susie’s call on the golf course. She was surprised that he picked up the phone himself.
“Ken Brennan speaking.”
“Oh my God, you don’t have a secretary?” asked Susie.
She was flustered. The detective had answered on the first ring. She could barely get the story out—Greg’s death, the coroner’s finding, the dead end. He asked her to send him some files; he’d take a look. She said she had been feeling under the weather, but she would try to pull together what she had, pronto, and send it off to him.
“Well,” said Brennan, “you need to fuckin’ take care of yourself.”
Like everything Brennan says, this came in a thick New York accent and a voice that sounds like it’s strained through a cubic yard of gravel. It was a no-bullshit, you-better-listen-to-me command that was all the more startling because he had said something tender. It endeared him to Susie immediately.
Brennan is a retired Long Island cop and former DEA agent who makes a good living as a private detective in Florida. That’s why he was on the golf course in February. He’s pushing sixty, still solid, ruddy, and stylish, in the South Florida manner. Blue-eyed, thick-necked, and ruggedly handsome, he is partial to lightweight short-sleeved shirts that show off his torso and big arms. He wears flashes of gold at the neck and wrist, and Celtic rings on several fingers. Brennan’s hair is mostly white now and is combed straight back on the sides and straight up in the front, in a low-key pompadour, cocky but dignified.
Months earlier, not long after Greg’s death, Susie’s friend Kea Sherman had told her and Michael about Brennan. Sherman, a young lawyer, had grown close to Susie and Greg when she lived for a time at their bed-and-breakfast while she clerked for a judge in Lafayette. She had her own practice in New Orleans now, and sharing Susie’s frustration with the investigation, she had hit upon the strategy of filing a lawsuit against the hotel as a means of pursuing the probe privately. She had read “The Case of the Vanishing Blonde,” my article in Vanity Fair (December 2010) detailing Brennan’s remarkable success in resolving a 2005 cold case that had stumped the police in Miami. Now, when the investigation seemed hopeless, Sherman brought up Brennan again.
“If you want to do something,” she urged Susie, “you have got to call this guy, the one I told you about. Just find him.”
Brennan can be found readily on the Internet and is asked to look into more cases than he can handle. People come to him with unsolved murders and disappearances. Often they see him as their last hope. He takes these people seriously and handles them gently. He usually offers to review crime-scene photos and a summary of the case for free before making up his mind. When he reads a file, he is looking for a case that intrigues him but also one where he thinks he might be able to accomplish something. If the victim is someone who, say, vanished without a trace years ago, and there are no leads, he’ll pass—“I ain’t in the business of giving people false hopes,” he says. The Fleniken case appealed to him not only because of the mystery but also because there were so many avenues to explore—Greg’s family and coworkers, hotel guests, the maintenance man who had been the last to see him alive. To Detective Apple, none of these leads seemed new anymore, but to Brennan, they were all new and potentially promising. He knew that a fresh pair of eyes was perhaps the most valuable thing he brought to an investigation.
Brennan visited Lafayette in April. He worked Susie over first, asking her a lot of hard questions about their relationship, about Greg’s faithfulness, about insurance arrangements, satisfying himself that the wife had no clear motive to have Greg killed.
“Let me ask you one more thing,” said Brennan. “Was there anything about the crime scene that didn’t seem right to you? That seemed off?”
Susie told him that she was surprised that the room had been so warm when Greg’s coworkers entered it the following morning. Her husband liked to crank up the AC at night. She said he liked to sleep in a cold room.
Then Brennan went home and made arrangements for a second trip, to Beaumont.
Apple came out to a sports bar to meet him. Brennan was wearing a silky T-shirt under a sport coat, gold around his neck. He loomed over the detective. The two men ate and talked. Brennan said he just wanted to spend some time getting to know Apple before they reviewed the case. He told the Beaumont detective what he always tells the cops he meets in his work: “Look, I’m not a maverick. I don’t do things half-cocked. If I decide we’re going to do this, we’re going to do it as a team. There’s nothing I’m going to do that you’re not going to know about it, and there should be nothing that you’re going to do that I don’t know about. The one thing I won’t do is fuck up your case. . . . I’ve been doing this a long time. But I also know that you’re the guy in charge here, so it’s your case.”
Part of what was going on was Brennan checking out Apple. “I don’t want to work with somebody I don’t like,” he told me. He prides himself on being able to read people very quickly. He liked the Beaumont detective.
It was mutual. As Apple would put it later, “Ken has good people skills.”
The following morning, Apple picked up Brennan, and they visited the hotel room. There Apple showed Brennan the crime-scene photos and the autopsy results, and reviewed what he had done over the previous seven months. Brennan heard him out and then announced, with what he would later admit was overstatement: “I think I know how this guy died. I think I know when he died, and I think I know who killed him. And I think I know how we’re going to catch him.”
“Come on!” said Apple.
“Hear me out. I’ll tell you what I think, but first I’ve got to call the guy’s wife.”
He called Susie’s cell phone.
“Your husband, was he left- or right-handed?” he asked.
“He was right-handed.”
“And when he smoked, did he smoke with the cigarette in his left hand or his right hand?”
“He always smoked with his right hand.”
“You sure?”
“I’m positive.”
Brennan hung up and explained his conclusions to Apple. Susie had already told
him how cold Greg kept his room. This helped fix the time of death. As Brennan saw it, the air conditioner had shut down with everything else when the circuit breaker blew. That time was known. Hotel records showed that the repairman had left Greg alive and well at eight thirty p.m. The movie resumed, and apparently Greg forgot to flip the AC back on. It would have taken a few minutes for the room to grow warm enough for him to notice, and by the time it had, he was dead. That’s why he had been found in a warm room—as Brennan put it, “In September, it’s hot as fuck in Beaumont, Texas.”
The cigarette scotched the notion that Greg had been beaten severely somewhere else, perhaps even just out in the hall, and then returned to 348. A hallway scenario would have explained why nothing had been disturbed in the room, but the cigarette ruled it out. There was no way his attackers, returning him, would have added the fine touch of cupping one hand under his body and delicately placing a burning cigarette between his fingers. It was also unlikely, given the ruptured ventricle, that Greg would have had time to return to the room after such a beating and calmly light up before keeling over. More likely, Greg had lit this cigarette himself before whatever happened to him happened. If Greg was right-handed, why was the burned-out cigarette found in his left hand? As Brennan pieced it together, after examining the state of the room—the pillows against the headboard, the candy, phone, and ashtray laid out neatly alongside where he would have been sitting, watching his movie—Greg had gotten up from the bed and headed toward the door, shifting the cigarette to his left hand in order to grab the door handle with his right . . . and died in his tracks.
It was hard to see this making sense, but Brennan had learned to be patient. A crime was a puzzle. Every piece mattered. It was a mistake to let what you do not know race out ahead of what you do. You might construct a perfectly satisfying version of a crime, one that you could even sell to a judge or jury. Brennan had known plenty of cops and lawyers who would grow so wedded to a theory that they were willing to trim the facts to make them fit. But he was a perfectionist. If there was even one small piece that did not fit, the puzzle was incomplete. So he was willing to follow the evidence, even in unlikely directions. Even when the conclusions it suggested were absurd. Greg could not have been beaten to death in his room, the evidence suggested, and yet he had died there, and he had died quickly after sustaining his wounds. Somehow, that’s what had happened. Despite his earlier pronouncement to Apple, Brennan didn’t know yet exactly how it had happened, and could not yet imagine an answer, but he was convinced that Greg had been quietly minding his own business just minutes, even seconds, before he was killed.
This is what led to the electricians, who were close by. Their room had been partly blacked out by the blown circuit at the same time Greg’s had been. Of all the scenarios Apple had considered, this was the one that made the most sense: the union guys, who may have been drunk, might have confronted Greg in the doorway, exchanged words, and kicked him to death right there. Brennan asked Apple if he had interviewed them.
“Yeah, they were nice,” said Apple.
“See anything hinky?”
“No, no.”
“I’m sure if they were drinking they had to talk about it to each other,” said Brennan. “So somebody knows about them. Probably one or two of their close friends or their coworkers are going to know about this.”
They next paid a visit to Dr. Brown. Brennan wanted to know if the injuries Brown had seen might have been caused by a severe beating. They might have, the doctor said. The laceration of the scrotum could have been caused by a hard kick, especially if the assailant had been wearing steel-toed boots or boots that had metal hooks to hold the laces. The electricians wore construction boots.
Brennan asked Apple to start interviewing men who had worked with the union electricians the previous summer. He returned home to continue inspecting the hotel’s surveillance video. It was time-consuming work and not particularly helpful. He calls it “looking to see the to and fro.” The cameras showed Greg coming in from work that evening. They showed several of the electricians making trips to their vehicles in the parking lot. But there was nothing obviously suspicious.
When Brennan returned to Beaumont in late May, he and Apple went to see some of the electricians’ coworkers who had not yet been interviewed. By this time the union electricians had been gone for seven months. Apple’s efforts with their coworkers had uncovered nothing, but Brennan was convinced the pursuit was worthwhile. Human nature being what it was, if any of the electricians knew something about Greg’s death, word would have spread.
So Apple and Brennan made the rounds. Yes, most of the men had heard about the man who died in the Eleganté Hotel. What a shame. Did anyone know yet what had happened to him? Everything these men knew was second- or thirdhand or worse, and the stories were, predictably, confused. As Ken would remember it later, one of the crew foremen, a man named Aaron Bourque, had heard something about a gun going off in a boardinghouse.
“No,” Apple corrected him. “That’s not the same case. This was the one where a man got in a fight at the Eleganté Hotel.”
Bourque had heard nothing about that.
As they drove away from Bourque’s house, Brennan said, “We need to go back to the hotel.”
“What are we going back there for?” Apple asked, noting that he and Brennan had already inspected the room thoroughly.
“We’re going to look for a bullet.”
Apple pointed out that they were not investigating a shooting.
“Yeah, but this guy mentioned a gun. Any time somebody mentions a gun, you gotta check that shit out. Everybody remembers a piece of a story. But when somebody mentions a gun, that’s the kind of thing you recall. That’s the part of the story that isn’t going to get changed.”
Brennan believed that Greg Fleniken had been beaten to death right there in the doorway to his room. It had happened quickly. What if there had been a gun involved? Maybe these electricians believed they had shot Greg, even if they had not. Still, if a gun had gone off, there would be a trace of it in that hotel room.
So they got hotel security to let them back into room 348.
They opened up the blinds and began inspecting the floor, the furniture, the walls—everything. They both worked on their hands and knees, shining flashlights under furniture. They focused most of their effort around the doorway to the room, because that’s where the fatal scuffle had likely occurred. They found nothing. Brennan was frustrated, convinced now that somehow a gun had been involved. They were about to give up when he noticed an indentation in the wall alongside the closed service door that opened into the adjacent room, 349. The indentation was a repair job. It appeared to be right where the doorknob would hit the wall when the door was swung open—typical wear and tear. But when he opened the door, the knob and the dent didn’t meet. The doorknob touched the wall slightly to the right of the patch. Something else had damaged the wall at that spot. Even after the repair there remained a slight divot.
“Let’s take a look at the other side,” Brennan suggested. When they got into room 349, there was no mistaking what they found on the wall there: a small hole that had been amateurishly patched.
“That’s a fuckin’ bullet hole,” said Brennan.
Brennan stood alongside the smaller hole in 349, measuring its height on the wall against his hip. Then he walked back to 348 and did the same thing. The marks lined up. The neat hole in 349 was an entry hole; the divot in 348 had patched an exit hole. The worker who had done the work on 348’s wall had recorded what she found. There was no report of a repair job in 349. Someone had patched that hole with what looked like toothpaste. It blended so nicely with the color of the wall that unless you were looking for it, you would not see it.
“You got a forensics team?” Brennan asked Apple.
When Beaumont’s lab crew showed up, they carefully excavated both holes and shone a laser through. The trajectory pointed straight to the bed where Greg had been sitting,
smoking, eating candy, and watching his movie.
Brennan said, “This motherfucker was shot.”
Dr. Brown was not convinced.
He had examined the man’s body from head to toe, cut him open, inspected his inner organs one by one, and reversed the expectations of the police. With precision and with the insight of years, he had determined that Greg Fleniken had died not from natural causes but from a severe beating. Now they wanted to tell him, on the basis of some new theory, that his own careful and professional observations were wrong? That he had missed, of all things, a bullet wound?
Brennan had volunteered to do the talking. After he and Apple had found the bullet hole and traced the trajectory, the answer to the mystery of Greg’s death was clear, he believed. But in order to act, in order to bring Greg’s killer or killers to justice, they would have to get the coroner to rewrite his finding. You could not argue in court that a defendant had shot someone when the medical examiner’s office had concluded the victim had not been shot.
“Do me a favor,” Brennan asked Apple. “Let me handle this whole fuckin’ thing. I know it’s your investigation, it’s your deal, but you’ve got to work with this guy from here on out, so if he gets pissed off or annoyed, I don’t want him pissed off and annoyed with you. Let him get pissed off at me.”
Brown’s office was a mess. Papers, files, books everywhere—every available surface was buried, even the floor. Brennan and Apple cleared away space on two chairs to sit down, and when they mentioned they were working the Fleniken case, the doctor asked, “Oh, did you catch the guy that beat him up?”