are single men wearing giant sombreros. Great. Just fucking great.”
The next four hours of our lives were spent in the most ridiculously boring manner ever, aside from watching The King’s Speech back to back. What we did was set all the cameras in the hotel to the same starting point; five minutes before Leslie enters the elevator, while she is still sitting at the bar. Then we focused on the elevator camera, taking note of every.single.goddamn.person that entered or exited it. We would do one person at a time. If someone went up the elevator, we matched what room he went in to with the data from the keycard readout we had. If that person never reappeared on camera during the timeframe, he was a suspect. If he came down again, obviously alone, we would follow them through their travels until the timeframe was closed. If there was no funny business, that man was removed from the suspect list.
While it was true we were looking for a pair of men, we couldn’t afford to just focus on duos. We have no idea if the attacker followed the victim up to her floor then had somebody already there waiting for them. Keycards recorded all the data of being used, but there was no data on file from doors being opened from the inside. There was really no surefire way to tell what happened, so we followed everybody.
We had the screens lined up in sequence. The one thing we had going for us was that it was morning. The casino floor was not very crowded and a lot of people were coming down into the lobby for coffee then going right back up. Also, several people were checking out. We watched them all. If someone was going to check out, they got off the elevator then would have to cross through the casino, into the lobby then out the lobby doors to the outside. Or, they could have gotten off the elevator, made their way to the parking garage elevator, taken it down, and then entered the garage directly from the casino. The camera caught their every move, even through the maze of cars. We had all our screens in order. We continued watching, checking off people one at a time who left empty-handed before or after our time frame.
When all was said and done we had a handful of people still on our suspect’s list and no real way to dig any deeper in to them. We had to think of something else. We decided we would have to just start taking guesses. At first, if someone went up to their room and never came down, we kept them on the suspect list. The reasoning behind this was; if the girl got out undetected, so could the attackers. But after hitting that final brick wall, we had to start eliminating that particular set of people.
We still had more than a handful of suspects.
“E?”
“Yeah?”
“What time did Balls go up to his room, according to the key log?”
“Hold on, six something. Let me check.” She flipped through our rather expansive notebook of suspects, notes, non-suspects, time tables, drawings of happy faces, games of tic-tac-toe and various other crap all somehow related to this case until she found the information she needed. “He got up to his room at six-forty am and apparently again at seven-twelve. Wait…”
“The security guy said Balls got to his room then later pushed their room service tray out into the hallway a little while later. The tray was still in the hallway when Balls was discovered. You were in a waking coma at the time of this conversation.”
“Jesus Christ, so now our times are over-lapping, you realize this, right?”
“Why do you think I asked?”
17.
We decided to go up and take a look at Balls’ and Vince’s room. The elevator ride was hell. Pure torture. And on top of that, first we had to take one elevator up to our room so I could grab my work bag, then take it down to the lobby, then get on a different elevator and take it to the thirty-seventh floor where all the action occurred. Hell, I tells ya, hell!
We entered the room using the key we were given by Mr. Adams, the head of
The next four hours of our lives were spent in the most ridiculously boring manner ever, aside from watching The King’s Speech back to back. What we did was set all the cameras in the hotel to the same starting point; five minutes before Leslie enters the elevator, while she is still sitting at the bar. Then we focused on the elevator camera, taking note of every.single.goddamn.person that entered or exited it. We would do one person at a time. If someone went up the elevator, we matched what room he went in to with the data from the keycard readout we had. If that person never reappeared on camera during the timeframe, he was a suspect. If he came down again, obviously alone, we would follow them through their travels until the timeframe was closed. If there was no funny business, that man was removed from the suspect list.
While it was true we were looking for a pair of men, we couldn’t afford to just focus on duos. We have no idea if the attacker followed the victim up to her floor then had somebody already there waiting for them. Keycards recorded all the data of being used, but there was no data on file from doors being opened from the inside. There was really no surefire way to tell what happened, so we followed everybody.
We had the screens lined up in sequence. The one thing we had going for us was that it was morning. The casino floor was not very crowded and a lot of people were coming down into the lobby for coffee then going right back up. Also, several people were checking out. We watched them all. If someone was going to check out, they got off the elevator then would have to cross through the casino, into the lobby then out the lobby doors to the outside. Or, they could have gotten off the elevator, made their way to the parking garage elevator, taken it down, and then entered the garage directly from the casino. The camera caught their every move, even through the maze of cars. We had all our screens in order. We continued watching, checking off people one at a time who left empty-handed before or after our time frame.
When all was said and done we had a handful of people still on our suspect’s list and no real way to dig any deeper in to them. We had to think of something else. We decided we would have to just start taking guesses. At first, if someone went up to their room and never came down, we kept them on the suspect list. The reasoning behind this was; if the girl got out undetected, so could the attackers. But after hitting that final brick wall, we had to start eliminating that particular set of people.
We still had more than a handful of suspects.
“E?”
“Yeah?”
“What time did Balls go up to his room, according to the key log?”
“Hold on, six something. Let me check.” She flipped through our rather expansive notebook of suspects, notes, non-suspects, time tables, drawings of happy faces, games of tic-tac-toe and various other crap all somehow related to this case until she found the information she needed. “He got up to his room at six-forty am and apparently again at seven-twelve. Wait…”
“The security guy said Balls got to his room then later pushed their room service tray out into the hallway a little while later. The tray was still in the hallway when Balls was discovered. You were in a waking coma at the time of this conversation.”
“Jesus Christ, so now our times are over-lapping, you realize this, right?”
“Why do you think I asked?”
17.
We decided to go up and take a look at Balls’ and Vince’s room. The elevator ride was hell. Pure torture. And on top of that, first we had to take one elevator up to our room so I could grab my work bag, then take it down to the lobby, then get on a different elevator and take it to the thirty-seventh floor where all the action occurred. Hell, I tells ya, hell!
We entered the room using the key we were given by Mr. Adams, the head of
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