Chapter 4 - The Police Report
By 4:30 pm, we were sitting in the brightly lit precinct station downtown.
The waiting area smelled of stale coffee, old paper, and floor wax. Leo was finally resting comfortably, wrapped in a clean fleece blanket provided by the clinic, sleeping soundly in a stroller Sarah had managed to grab from the trunk of her car. The fever-reducing medication Dr. Vance administered had finally brought his temperature down to a safer level.
A tall, broad-shouldered detective with a permanent crease between his eyebrows walked out of a glass-walled office, holding a thick manila folder.
"Mr. Brooks? Ms. Brooks?" he asked, scanning the room.
"Detective Miller," the officer said, shaking my hand firmly before turning to Sarah. "I read over the initial medical report from Dr. Vance and your preliminary statement at the triage desk. What you're describing isn't just poor babysitting or negligence. It's felony child endangerment, assault on a minor, and attempted kidnapping."
He gestured for us to follow him back into his office, a cramped space dominated by overflowing case files, a corkboard covered in pinned photographs, and a window looking out over the gray city streets.
We sat down across from his metal desk. Sarah placed the folded prepaid ride receipt and the daycare card down on the surface like pieces of evidence on a crime scene table.
"Tell me everything from the moment you walked into that playroom, Mr. Brooks," Detective Miller said, clicking the cap off a ballpoint pen.
I gave him a precise, chronological breakdown of the nightmare: walking down the hall, seeing Chloe with the salted lemon, the boyfriend pinning Leo's wrists, my intervention, the violent physical retaliation that split my lip and bruised my ribs, Sarah's arrival, and the sudden discovery of the hidden transit receipt and the missing daycare card as the babysitter fled.
Detective Miller listening in total silence, occasionally jotting down notes in crisp, efficient handwriting. When I finished, he turned his attention to Sarah.
"Do you have the contact information you used to hire this Chloe person?" the detective asked.
Sarah pulled out her smartphone, unlocked the screen, and navigated to a messaging app. "I have her profile on the babysitting platform, her phone number, and her digital application resume. But when I tried to check her profile while we were driving here, her account was already deactivated."
"Standard operating procedure for transient grifters," Detective Miller asserted, taking her phone to snap a few reference photos of the screen with his department camera. "They build a fake profile using stolen photos, secure a few gigs, scout out high-value targets—usually single parents or busy household items with valuable assets or vulnerable children—and then look for an opportunity to strike."
"Wait, you think she targeted us specifically because of our house or assets?" Sarah asked, her eyes widening.
"It's possible," Miller said slowly, leaning back in his chair. "Or worse—they were looking to snatch the infant or toddler for an illegal placement ring. Interstate bus terminals are the number one transit hub for human traffickers trying to cross state lines before amber alerts can be issued. If you hadn't walked in when you did, ma'am, your son would likely have been halfway across the state border by nightfall."
A cold shudder ran down my spine. The image of little Leo being carried onto a greyhound bus by two strangers flashed through my mind, and my fist clenched so hard my knuckles turned white.
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"Can you track them?" I asked, my voice is flat and dangerous. "They used a prepaid ride app. That means there's a digital footprint, a credit card linked to the account, or a GPS ping from the vehicle that picked them up."
Detective Miller gave a small, confident smirk. "That's the beauty of modern digital trails, Mr. Brooks. Even if they delete their profiles, ride-share companies keep comprehensive server logs, pickup GPS coordinates, and device IDs. My cyber unit is already pulling the ride data from the timestamp on that receipt. We'll have their exact pickup location, the driver's identity, and where they were dropped off within the hour."
