Now I suppose by now you're probably thinking I'm the densest person on the planet. Anyone paying even the slightest bit of attention to this story will probably have figured out what was really going on long before now.
I admit, though, it just plain didn't occur to me. Maybe I just wasn't seeing the forest for the trees that evening, but I didn't pick up on all the clues at all. Looking back on it now, it seems so damn obvious, but at the time, I had no idea.
More on that later, though. I spent the next couple of hours going over pictures and records with Mark. We started with Victoria Sanchez. She was Hispanic, with straight, black hair and darkly colored skin that almost made her look African-American, but not quite. According to her records, she was a divorcee who took the job at the casino to pay off a huge amount of debt incurred by her deadbeat ex-husband. She had no children or other family in the area, something we had already noticed was the case for all those girls who'd previously disappeared. Vicky certainly fit the profile, all right.
Rather than try to study the hundreds of other employee files, we narrowed our search to the 35% or so of them that had backgrounds similar to the others. My "Ashley Richardson" false identity popped up right away, as did Heather Andrews, Loriel Wellington, and Veronica Myers, and a couple of other girls I've met along the way. Interestingly, I also saw Elizabeth Fitzgerald's name listed, but because she'd already survived a year with the miniaturizer in place, she was in the lowest risk category. The disappearances all seemed to happen within the first month or two of employment.
We printed out each one and reviewed them individually, sorting them by what the computer projected was the most likely target. Unfortunately, I saw that Lori was at the top of the list. She had no connections, no family, no other employers, and wasn't a member of any known organization. She also wasn't going to school or doing anything else for which she'd be missed. And, as an even more depressing thought, we'd already been able to figure out that she was a runaway who wanted to stay missing. If we could discover that, so could others. Lori was someone who could easily vanish tomorrow, and no one (with the exception of myself and Heather) would ever miss her.
We moved along, and came to Veronica's name next. As I'd already suspected from her speech pattern, she was from England, or more specifically, London. According to her casino employment application, she'd come to the USA to escape a bad relationship, and she freely admitted to not using her real name lest she be tracked down. Apparently the casino had no problem with this, since Veronica had filed to have her name legally changed once she had her green card. She was also working on speaking without her accent, as I'd already noted.
The computer felt she was a high risk because she wanted to stay invisible, but she also had a second job as a female wrestler at the WWF's casino on the other side of town. That explained the muscles, I thought. I'd figured her for some kind of weightlifter or something, and I guess that was partially true. Anyway, with a second job like that, she'd be more likely to be missed if she vanished, but not so much if she'd been married or had dependents.
Four or five names further down the list I saw myself, or rather my alias, which was worrisome. I knew, of course, that my purpose in being here was to get abducted if at all possible, so the perpetrators could be caught in the act. I didn't relish the thought, however. If someone was indeed kidnapping girls and spiriting them out of the casino, they were surely doing it while we were shrunk. That would mean someone would pick me up and carry me away, and who knew what they'd do to me before rescue came?
I shook that off, however. It didn't do any good to dwell on it. Hopefully, with Mark even closer to the hotel now, it wouldn't take him any time at all to track me down. After all, the implants I wore worked just fine as tracking devices, and that particular feature had a much greater range than the video and audio feeds.
Heather came right after me, and you already know her story. She didn't rank as high on the risk factors list because she was attending college here in town, and if she stopped going to classes, someone might notice that more readily.
We were, of course, operating on the assumption that somewhere out there someone was investigating the girls before abducting them. It's what the pattern suggested so far. However, I had to admit, there was a possibility that these were just random disappearances. With fully 35% of the casino's female staff within the known target parameters to date, it was still possible that the known factors were just coincidences.
Like I said earlier, though, I don't believe in coincidences.
Anyhow, after a while we finished with that and I got up to leave. I rather hoped Mark would apologize for his rudeness to me earlier, and at least try to explain what he was up to, but he didn't. In fact, he seemed rather eager for me to go, and somewhat impatient that I hadn't already departed.
No, I STILL hadn't figured it out, but I would in good time, so just be patient!
After I left, I noticed it was after ten o'clock. It was too late to go to the casino's VR room, I figured, so instead I stopped by the movie store and looked around. Since I'd chosen to take on the personality of Valerie, I decided to watch some episodes of "Land of the Giants," which I'd at least seen a few of last season. If I'd realized back then that I'd wind up as small as her, I would've paid closer attention!
Fortunately, the entire first season was available as a DVD rental, so I forked over the bucks and headed out. I watched the first episode, which took two hours to explain how the ship crashed on the giant world, and also dealt with the first encounters between the little people and the evil government that ran the place. By then I was tired, and dropped off to sleep, dreaming of men in Nazi-like uniforms chasing me in the tall grass.
The next day I went to work, and the instant I showed up, I was met by Heather. She was working the casino floor, so of course she was small already. "Oh, Ashley!" she yelled up at me, almost bouncing up and down with excitement. "I'm SO glad you showed me that place! I had the time of my life last night!"
"Really? I wouldn't have guessed," I replied sarcastically.
"Come on, let's go to the break room, I wanna tellya all about it!" she practically begged.
I agreed, so we headed across the floor to the nearest room. I held the door open so she could scoot inside, then sat down at one of the full sized tables. Without hesitation or difficulty, she clambered up on one of the seats, then up onto the top surface, where she could talk to me directly without having to look up all the time.
"It was so cool!" Heather gushed. "Tallguy and I went up to one of the rooms'n he made it look like a supermarket! I tried to hide in the aisles and he chased me! It was so REAL!"
"Is that ALL that happened?" I asked doubtfully.
"Oh, no!" she replied, pacing back and forth on the table. "After a while he caught me and played with me like a toy! He squeezed me all over with those giant fingers of his! It was so cool!"
"That's it? That's all he did?"
"Well, yeah, he had to leave all of a sudden like," she went on. "But then I met somebody else and we went up to another room. He made me change sizes a buncha times till I was real small, just a coupla inches! Then he helped me out of my uniform, and--"
"Okay, stop right there," I interrupted. "I can pretty much figure out the rest, thank you!"
"Oh, but that was the best part! It was jus' like I'd always dreamed! He let me crawl around all over his body, and when I squeezed my way down into his pants, he was--"
I put my hands over my ears. "Too much information!" I complained loudly. "I'm not LIS-ten-ingggg!"
"Okay, okay!" She finally stopped wandering around and sat down next to me, crossing her legs and looking up at me with satisfaction. "I just wish I'd had a sensin' suit!" she sighed. "I would've liked to have actually felt some of the things I was seein', y'know? But I still got off half a dozen times, I think. I lost count!"
"Geez!" I exclaimed, rolling my eyes at her lack of modesty. "Lori was right! We really do have to get you laid!"
She ignored that. "Oh, if only I knew who some of those people really were," sighed Heather. "Especially Tallguy! He was a lot nicer than anyone else I met. I wish he hadn't left so fast. I'd love to really meet a man who liked this stuff as much as I did! He wouldn't tell me, though. He said he liked bein' anonymous. The other guys did, too, dammitall!"
I nodded, thinking that was probably for the best. Who knew what kind of person might show up to meet Heather, if they really knew who she was? Then something else occurred to me. "Heather," I asked, "How many people did you, um, interact with in there?"
"Oh, lots!" she laughed. "That guy Talon you told me about shrunk me and put me in the Olympic games! That was lotsa fun! Then someone named ElfMan won me as a prize, and took me to a private room. There was a realistic forest there with trees and everything! We got shrunk together and wandered around, which was so cool, 'cept I didn't like the bugs too much. Then we made out on a tree branch and--"
Okay, that was all I needed to know. "Well, I'm glad you had fun," I interrupted, looking down at her with an accusing look. Now that I could see her face more closely, I could see there were dark circles under her eyes. "Hey, just how late were you there, anyway?"
"Whaddya mean?" she asked, grinning sheepishly up at me. "I never went home!"