The gun deal gone wrong scenario is ridiculous. He legally purchased these weapons so that would make him the most idiotic gun dealer in the West.
Secondly, he clearly prepped for this attack - casing various venues, the video cameras set up to monitor the hallway, sending his dogface girlfriend away and sending her money to buy a house, the ballistic calculations on the notepad, the gloves he was wearing so he didn’t burn himself while firing, taking a hammer with him to knock out the windows and now the lack of hard drive - its all very obviously a planned attack.
So he removed the hard drive and tossed it in the hallways trash - it was long destroyed and gone before the keystone cops even discovered it was missing. Big deal - common sense move if you want to cover your tracks. Smarter than just erasing it with a commercial program. Law enforcement can recover deleted data so this again shows Paddock was no dummy.
The only conspiracy I see is the hotel trying to CYA from lawsuits since they clearly did not contact the police very fast. That is typical of Vegas hotels - they want to handle things in house. They aren’t telling us something but its probably not some grand big deal - more like the fact their security team screwed up.
Why even take a computer unless he was going to use it to communicate? And I imagine his cell was more than adequate for that.
And I believe he made hand written notes regarding rifle elevation/distance calculations. So why go to all that trouble with the laptop and then removing drive?
And trash can be recovered. He had to be smart enough to understand that. Paddock removing the drive doesn't seem to fit well in my opinion. Btw, did they ever reveal if he had a smart phone? Is so, it makes the missing hard drive story even more questionable from my perspective.