REPORT: BABY LOVE
FILE #: 120

AT NIGHT, IN AN UNIDENTIFIED CITY , running from Miss Parker, Sam the Sweeper and a sweeper team, Jarod ducks down an alley and jumps into a large garbage dumpster. While he’s there, a sedan pulls up quickly near the dumpster and parks. Jarod can’t see very much from his vantage point, but does see, after the driver exist the sedan, that the driver is wearing penny loafers with coins in the middle of the saddle of the shoes. He can also see that the car has a license plate that reads: The Windswept State, 3465, and has a red decal with the letter “L” (in white) on it. Jarod withdraws into the bottom of the dumpster as the driver of the sedan gets out of his car, approaches, and throws something into the dumpster beside Jarod.

The driver of the sedan then gets back into his vehicle and drives away quickly, just as the car carrying Miss Parker and the sweeper team approaches. Mistaking the fast-moving sedan for Jarod’s getaway car, Miss Parker has her team chase after the sedan… leaving Jarod in the ally, in the dark, alone. Or is he? He can hear something moving and making noise in the dumpster beside him, and rummages through the garbage to see what it is. He finds a large produce box, and when he uncovers it he finds inside it… a five-month-old baby boy. The baby is alive and starting to cry.

Jarod takes the baby to Christine’s House of Beauty and, despite the late hour, knocks on the door of the salon until Christine, the proprietress, answers him and comes to the door. He tells her he needs to stay with her for a little while again, and she answers, “Not smelling like that , you’re not.” She thanks him for the help he gave her recently with a phony lawsuit a customer had filed against her shop, but, she tells Jarod, her husband, Axe, is due to be back home the next day and if he finds a man living upstairs he’ll go nuts. Jarod shows her the baby, and asks again to be let inside. Shocked by the sight of the infant, Christine lets him in, and lets Jarod move back into the apartment above the shop.

Jarod had been fleeing the sweeper team after they found out he was lifting blueprints from the same architectural firm that had helped to build The Centre. Sam the Sweeper found the blueprints Jarod had taken, during their chase, in a gutter and turned them over to Miss Parker. Back at The Centre, Miss Parker, Broots and Sydney go over the blueprints trying to figure out why Jarod thought they were so important. Between the sheaves of drafting paper, Broots finds some notepaper sheets covered with calculations, cryptic information and a notation about “SL-27”. When they see the notation, both Sydney and Miss Parker make a grab for the notes, but Miss Parker wrests them away from Sydney and walks off with them.

BACK AT CHRISTINE’S , Jarod watches a DSA of himself as a four-year-old, on the day he was kidnapped and brought to The Centre… with a hood over his head. The hood removed, sitting alone in an in-take room, the child-Jarod sings a mournful lullaby to himself and looks thoroughly distressed. We can hear men in the background talking about him. One says, “They’re calling him ‘Jarod’… He misses his parents…”

The adult-Jarod turns off the DSA, walks across the living room area of the apartment, and sits in front of the infant he rescued from the dumpster. Smiling at the baby, he telephones Sydney and asks him, “How could somebody abandon a child?” Sydney asks if Jarod is talking about his parents, and Jarod answers, “I’m talking about all parents.” Sydney says there are many thing that could motivate a parent to give up a child, then he asks if this line of questioning has anything to do with the blueprints Jarod had taken from the architectural firm. Jarod simply tells him, “You’ll figure it out,” and hangs up.

BACK AT THE CENTRE , Broots tells Sydney he did the search on “SL-27” that Sydney had asked him to do, but came up with little information. There were two license plates with the numbers SL-27, but the owners died in the 70’s; and SL-27 was also the generic name for an antibiotic developed in 1983… but Broots could find nothing else. Miss Parker enters the room and also asks Broots if he’s learned anything about SL-27. Broots suggests that Sydney and Miss Parker compare their own notes and discuss it among themselves.

After debugging a room in The Centre, Broots, Miss Parker and Sydney meet to compare and exchange what information they have. Miss Parker shows the men the bracelet she’d gotten from Dara, one of the children rescued from The Centre by Catherine Parker. Etched into the inside of the bracelet is “SL-27”. Sydney then shows Miss Parker and Broots the note his brother Jacob scribbled to him when, for a brief moment, Jacob had revived from his 30-year coma. On the note is “SL-27”. The clues don’t tell them much except that, whatever “SL-27” is, it was important to both Dara and Jacob. Sydney and Miss Parker beg Broots to keep searching for connection between the fragments of information, and he reluctantly agrees to do so.

AT CHRISTINE’S , Jarod creates a computer program that links his laptop to the missing persons database at the local police station. If anyone files a report on the baby, or on anyone who might be associated with him, the program will signal Jarod and let him know what the report is about.

AT THE CENTRE , in his “space”, Angelo sits shirtless in the middle of his bank of computer monitors, and is shaving his head with an electric razor while Mr. Raines and a sweeper watch him. The sweeper asks what Angelo is doing, and Mr. Raines says, “He appears to be expressing his individualism… It’s dangerous.” Then Raines demands that Angelo run a full security sweep of every system, inlet, outlet and sub-level of The Centre. After receiving a box of Cracker Jacks as an incentive, Angelo starts the sweep.

JAROD AND CHRISTINE, MEANWHILE , take the baby to the local Child Protective Services branch of the police station in the hopes that they can find some help in locating the baby’s parents. The place is so bustling with activity and so haunted by displaced children, however, that no one has the time to offer any real help. Jarod leaves suddenly, refusing to abandon the baby in such a place, and determined to find out who the baby’s parents are himself. He doesn’t want the infant to grow up alone, like he did. Christine tells him the baby isn’t his , and that he can’t keep it no matter what the circumstances are. She gets Jarod to promise her that if he can’t find the baby’s parents in 24 hours, he’ll turn the infant over to the police. As he’s walking back to the apartment with Christine, carrying the baby, Jarod notices several unmarked police units parked outside the station. They all have the same red decal on their license plates as the car he saw the night the baby was chucked into the dumpster. Christine asks him what it means, and he answers her with a stunned: “A cop threw this baby away.”

BACK AT THE APARTMENT , lying on the bed with the baby beside him, Jarod calls The Centre and asks Sydney if he’s discovered the significance of the blueprints and calculations yet. Miss Parker and Broots are eaves-dropping on the conversation. Miss Parker asks him what he means, and Jarod says he was just “digging up some more dirt” on The Centre, and that he was surprised Broots hadn’t figured it all out yet. Just before he hangs up, Jarod says, “I gotta go. It’s the baby’s nap-time.” Miss Parker looks at the phone and repeats, “Did he say ‘baby’ ?”

The “dirt” reference triggers something in Broots’ mind, and he pulls up the architectural data charts on The Centre during the time it was built. He quickly assesses the situation: When The Centre was built, 6.2 million cubic feet of dirt were carted away from the site, but The Centre itself and its twenty-six sub-levels only occupied 6.16 million cubic feet of space. There had been enough extra dirt carted away to make room for another sub-level… Sub-level 27 … “SL-27” .

AT CHRISTINE’S , Christine’s husband Axe returns home after a unprofitable trip to look for a new job. He was/is a garbage man — sanitation engineer — who lost his job after he blew out his back lifting an industrial bin.When he finds Jarod and the baby in the apartment above Christine’s shop he’s at first suspicious, then seems tickled by the fact that the baby is there. Jarod asks him if he likes kids, and Axe says, “I’d have a whole tribe if Christie, here, would cooperate.” He then offers to babysit for Jarod any time Jarod needs him to. The opportunity arises quickly.

Jarod poses as a mechanic at the police station maintenance garage, as he tries to find out who was driving the sedan with the red-sticker 3465 plate on it the night the baby was thrown in the dumpster. As he’s searching through the garage records, the sedan pulls in for some quick maintenance. The driver, Detective David W. Geary, tells Jarod to get the car fixed as soon as possible. Recognizing both the vehicle and Geary’s penny-loafer shoes, Jarod picks up a large wrench and is going to brain Geary with it. He thinks better of the idea, though, and lets Geary go… for the time being.

AT THE CENTRE , Broots escorts Miss Parker and Sydney to a sewer access port he’s found in The Centre’s twenty-sixth level; a port that’s on the opposite side of the building from where all the other sewer mains are. He and Sydney crack the seal on the portal and find below it a metal-rung ladder leading down in SL-27. Against his will, Broots goes down into the sub-level first, while Miss Parker and Sydney follow after him.

SL-27 is a burned out hulk. Sydney says he had heard rumors of a great fire in The Centre, but never saw the fire himself. Mr. Raines, he says, had been so injured in the fire that he now needed his supplemental portable oxygen tank to help him breathe. Miss Parker expresses outrage that the fire didn’t “finish the job”. Throughout SL-27, Broots, Miss Parker and Sydney find over one-hundred rooms… ashes littering everything; some of them with fresh footprints in them… melted children’s toys, including a jack-in-the-box… piles of used syringes… an environmental suit with a corpse in it; and a bullet hole through its eye… a room that has all the components of a SIM lab… and a birthing table with shackles on it. In a small fenced off area, clear of debris, they find six white plastic storage boxes. Broots returns to the surface, while Sydney and Miss Parker glance through the contents of the boxes. They’re all pertaining to “The Pretender Project”, and one of the boxes is filled with information about Jarod.

They find the hood used to cover Jarod’s head when, as a child, he was brought to The Centre, and they find intake paperwork that suggested that Jarod’s parents– in direct contradiction to everything they had been told previously — had not been dead when Jarod arrived at The Centre. Instead, Miss Parker and Sydney deduce, Jarod’s parents were alive , and Jarod had been stolen from them. There are no names on the intake paperwork, except for the signature of a “Special Expediter” who was responsible for bringing Jarod to The Centre. Sydney recognizes the signature as that belonging to his brother, Jacob .

A cell-phone call from Broots warns Miss Parker and Sydney that Mr. Raines knows security has been breached somewhere, and is having Angelo “sanitize the system”. Afraid of being caught in SL-27 with evidence of the truth about Jarod, Miss Parker and Sydney flee the area, leaving the boxes of files behind them.

AT CHRISTINE’S , while Axe and the baby watch basketball on television, Jarod continues his computer search for the baby’s parents. While he’s working, there is a “beep” that announces that a missing persons report has just been filed with the local police station. Jarod accesses the report, and discovers that it concerns a woman named Jeannette Connelly…. and her five-month-old son, Michael. Jarod looks up from the report, smiles at the baby, and says, “Hello, Michael.”

AT JEANNETTE CONNELLY’S APARTMENT , we see Detective Geary trying to break in through the front door. A neighbor woman, the one who filed a report, asks him who he is. Geary tells her he’s with the police, and is looking for Jeannette. The woman tells him she’s already given all the information she knows to “the other policeman… the one who was here about 15 minutes ago, before you got here.” As Geary is preparing to leave the apartment building, he hears over his walkie-talkie a report of a “jumper” who was rescued from a nearby bridge: a woman in her twenties who had probably been at the bottom of the bridge for several days, and who was being taken to St. Mary’s Medical Center as a Jane Doe, and put on suicide watch.

Detective Geary arrives at St. Mary’s looking for the Jane Doe, who he knows is Jeanette Connelly. He passes in front of an intern who working at a computer terminal at the nursing station. The intern is Jarod , and, having eaves-dropped on the walkie-talkie police chatter, he’s trying to find Jeannette, too. He accesses the hospital’s data base and changes Jeannette’s room number from 727 to 708. Believing she’s in Room 708, Geary goes there looking for her. Knowing she’s in Room 727, Jarod goes there . He finds Jeannette heavily sedated and strapped into her bed. He rousts her out, telling her he knows she’s not suicidal, telling her he knows where her baby is, and telling her that Geary is in the hospital trying to find her. Jarod and Jeannette escape through an emergency exit and down the stairwell, just as Geary realizes the room numbers were switched. Geary sees Jarod half-walking, half-carrying Jeannette down the stairwell, and chases after them.

Geary comes out of the stairwell into a parking garage. He searches all over for Jarod and Jeannette, but can’t see them. When he notices that some beads, hanging from the rear-view mirror of a van parked in the garage, are moving, he believes Jarod and Jeannette are in the van, and shoots several bullets through the van’s side. As he opens the van up to look inside, he hears and then sees Jarod racing off in a customized black-and-yellow Mustang with Jeannette inside.

AT CHRISTINE’S , still dressed in the intern’s clothes he’d taken from St. Mary’s, Jarod returns baby-Michael to Jeannette and asks her what is going on. Jeannette explains that she was an intern working in the offices of District Attorney Mitch Meyers, who’s is currently running for re-election. She’d had an affair with Meyers, that resulted in Michael’s birth, and, believing Meyers really loved her and would take care of his child, had approached him for child-support. Instead of helping her, Meyers sent Detective Geary after her. Geary had lured her into a car, claiming he was going to take her and Michael to Meyers, then kidnapped her, threw her off of the bridge in an attempt to kill her, and tossed her baby in a dumpster. Axe and Jarod are so disgusted by her story that they pledge to help Jeannette and contrive to expose both Geary and Meyers.

First, they have Jeannette call Mitch Meyers on the phone and get him to meet her in a public place where she can talk to him. Meyers doesn’t know it, but Jarod has Jeannette “wired” and listens to and records everything Meyers says. Then Jeannette tells Meyers that if he doesn’t want the whole sordid story to end up on the eleven o’clock news he’d better tell Geary to meet her in the alley where he’d left Michael with $50 thousand in hush-money. Meyers is shocked by her demands, but complies.

WHEN GEARY ARRIVES IN THE ALLEY with the money, he is met by Jarod and Axe, who pull up in a city sanitation truck that blocks the alley so Geary can’t escape from it. Axe and Jarod attack Geary, take his gun and badge from him, and then — with Jarod brandishing a knife — strip Geary of everything but his underwear.

Later, at a daytime outdoor meeting with the local media, Meyers gives a speech pertaining to his re-election. He tells on-lookers and the public that he’s a man of principals who understands the meaning of commitment, but as he says this, Jeannette slips through the crowd to where Meyers’ wife is standing, introduces herself, and tells her about the affair, the kidnapping, and the baby-snatching. Meanwhile, Jarod and Axe drive up in the sanitation truck with Meyers’ tape-recorded conversation with Jeannette blaring from loud-speakers mounted on the front of the vehicle. Jarod then flips a lever inside the truck and the back of it opens up and tips forward, dumping piles of garbage and a nearly naked, hand-cuffed, filthy Detective Geary out in front of the media. Press people line up to snap pictures while Jarod saunters up to Geary and empties a bag full of Michael’s dirty diapers onto Geary’s head. Last but not least, he tosses Geary his penny-loafers, then walks away with a look over his shoulder to Meyers… who is holding his head, and trying to look inconspicuous. Headlines later proclaim Meyers’ and Geary’s guilt in the abduction and attempted murder of Jeannette and her baby.

BACK AT CHRISTINE’S , Jarod says his goodbyes to Christine, Axe, Jeannette and Michael and leaves them smiling. While at The Centre, Miss Parker and Sydney return briefly to SL-27 in the hopes of getting a better look at the boxes of “Pretender” files there. When they arrive at the area where the boxes were kept, however, they find the boxes… but no files in them . All the paperwork has been removed. Miss Parker fears that Mr. Raines knows they found the files and took the paperwork himself, but Sydney tells her that if Raines believed they’d had access to the files he would have had them killed them by now. “Well, if he doesn’t have them,” Miss Parker asks, “who does?”

The episode ends with a shot of the inside of an air conditioning duct in The Centre. The camera shows us Angelo, sitting with his back against the wall of the duct… and with the “Pretender” files tied up in neat little bundles all around him…