Lost & Found

Six

It had been almost a week since the search for Jake had begun, and so far nothing had come up. They had talked to priors and everyone who was at the drug bust with the John Doe, but nobody gave up information about what the guy looked like. After forty-eight hours, they reported him missing and within another day, the news of the vanished-into-thin-air detective had quickly echoed through New York.

Two days after Jake's face had cycled throughout New York, they got a tip from someone working at a nearby hospital, who reports that they had recently treated someone who looked very similar.

When the squad arrived to the hospital, the doctor who claims to have treated Jake approaches them immediately.

Amy goes up and meets the doctor halfway. "Hi, I'm sergeant Santiago, you claimed to have treated a man following the description of detective Peralta?" She introduced herself, shining her badge toward the doctor.

The doctor nods. "Yes," he says with a small smile, "However his name wasn't the same."

"What did you treat him for?" Rosa asks, standing beside her friend in front of the man in the white coat.

He then shakes his head. "I'm sorry detective, that's under the strict laws of doctor-patient confidentiality, I'm legally not allowed to say."

Amy pipes up. "What if I told you that I'm married to detective Peralta, does that change it at all?"

"Well first of all, I would need to see legal proof of the marriage before I'm allowed to say anything that could break the rule," the doctor replies, causing both Rosa and Amy to roll their eyes, "And secondly, my patients father claimed that his wife was deceased."

Amy furrows her eyebrows. "His father? Why would he do it?"

Rosa shrugs. "Where are they?" She asks, snapping her attention to the doctor from Amy.

He shrugs. "I don't know. I went to check in my patient yesterday morning and when I went in there the room was empty. I checked after and the paperwork was signed for him to be discharged."

"Did his father give you the address on the form?" Amy questions, placing her hands on her hips.

The doctor pauses for a moment before nodding. "If it will help with the investigation, yes he did."

Amy smiles. "Great, we'll need that information to be able to track down where his father took him."

Before the doctor can leave to gather the information the sergeant asked for, Rosa speaks up too. "Also, we're gonna need security footage from inside and outside the hospital for facial recognition."

The man in the white coat nods and goes behind the desk to access the open computer.

He takes a few minutes before calling the two women back over again. He gives them the address his patients father had given him before taking them to the back of the building for the footage.

After an hour of skimming through the footage from the morning the day before, Rosa sits back in her chair and sighs audibly. "Nothing. Absolutely nothing. He just vanished from the hospital again."

Amy shakes her head. "That isn't possible, he must have left in the afternoon."

Rosa sits back up and continues the footage from the afternoon the same day. As another hour goes by, the footage begins to get dark as the afternoon becomes the evening and night. However, still no sign of Jake and his father.

"Unless there really is something such thing as the cloak from Harry Potter, there is no way in hell he and his father are able to sneak past all the cameras the hospital have placed around the building." Rosa sighs, putting her head into her hands.

Amy stands from the chair and leaves the room. "Well, at least we've got the address his father gave the hospital to work with, that might lead us somewhere instead."

Rosa stands and follows the sergeant out of the room, closing the door behind her. "Yeah, hopefully."

They walk in silence the the reception to thank the doctor for the information he had given them earlier that day. They leave the hospital in the same silence they drove back to the precinct with, neither one of them talking until they reached the fourth floor when they were approached by Terry at the gate into the bullpen.

"Did you get a trace on the address?" Amy asks, knowing that's why the squad were back at the precinct - as she had sent them to analyze the address before Rosa and herself had spent two hours watching the security footage.

Terry stumbles for a moment, hesitating with his answer before Rosa spits it out of him. He shakes his head quickly at the detective's threatening stare. "No, it was a fake address, the place doesn't exist."

Amy throws her fist down into the fence beside her before letting out a exasperated sigh. "Oh for the love of god," she mumbles to herself, "A fake?"

Terry nods, handing her back the slip of paper he had retrieved from his desk when he had heard the elevator ding open. "Yeah, Boyle checked the address three times just in case there was a mistake in the system. Whoever this guy is, he's covering his tracks good."

Amy sighs, not pausing before telling the lieutenant who was responsible. "It's Jake's father. He's the one who's doing this."

Terry's eyes widen. "Roger? Why would he do this?"

Amy shrugs. "I'm gonna call Karen, see if she would know anything about this."

She goes over to her husband's desk and sits down before pulling her phone out and calling her mother-in-laws number.

Karen picks up on the first ring. "Amy, hi, have you got anything on Jake?" She asks.

Amy sighs, looking to the floor of the bullpen, feeling the stares from Terry and Rosa burning the side of her face. "Uhm, we do, but it's not solid."

She can hear Karen shift from behind the phone. "Is something wrong?"

This makes Amy stop. She's now not sure if explaining it to her mother-in-law would be great, but in the other hand she could be holding some really valuable information that she doesn't even know is important.

She's broken back into reality when Karen calls her name through the phone again.

Amy nods. "Yeah, wait no, nothing's wrong. I'm just - we believe Roger is involved with this and is holding Jake somewhere, but I need to know if something's been off with him recently. The doctor said Jake's father took him out of the hospital yesterday morning, and he gave a fake address to where he was staying."

Karen pauses for a moment, the silence so clear you could hear crickets from miles away. But as quickly as the silence envelopes the call it's broken like a rock against a window. "That's not possible, Roger's been here. He hasn't left the house in days."

Amy furrows her eyebrows, looking up from the nick-nacks still sat on the top of her husband's desk to Rosa and Terry stood at her side. "Then who is the person pretending to be Jake's dad?"