Lauren, a maid in a hotel, was doing her daily cleaning routine and opened room 403. To her great surprise, she saw a little boy, no older than 10 years old, lying in the hotel bed. “How is this possible?” she wondered aloud. All of the guests had to check out before 10 am, and it was almost 12 pm. She tried to wake the boy, but he didn’t respond at all. He seemed exhausted! When she slightly lifted his blanket, she got the shock of her life and immediately called the police! Lauren couldn’t believe she had found this little boy all alone. The police said they would be there as soon as possible, but Lauren decided to start a little research on her own to kill some time. She started asking the hotel staff and guests if they had seen anything or anyone suspicious, but no one had any information. By the time the police arrived, Lauren hadn’t made any progress in her research. So, she decided to leave it to the officers. She explained the situation, expecting them to take it very seriously as it involved a young child. But to her surprise, the officers reacted nonchalantly. “His parents are probably somewhere inside the hotel.” This angered Lauren. How could the police be so lighthearted about this? But then, Lauren lifted up the blanket and showed the officers what was underneath. Suddenly, they were very interested in this case.  But what was the boy doing there all alone? Where were his parents, and what was hiding underneath his blanket? Lauren was a hardworking maid at a prestigious hotel in the city. It was a place of comfort and familiarity, where she knew every inch of the building and every guest who passed through. Every day, she would go about her routine of cleaning the rooms and making sure everything was in order.  She had seen some strange things guests left behind, from used condoms to someone’s wedding bands. But on that fateful day, her routine was disrupted when she entered room 403. On this day, Lauren found something that shocked her to her core. This was something she never expected to find, and it caught Lauren by surprise.  Lauren walked through the long hallway on the fourth floor. She had just finished cleaning room 401, so she was on her way to room 403, which was next door. These were her standard rooms, so she didn’t expect anything strange. But she was met with a strange sight as she pushed open the door. Someone was still lying in bed! Lauren quickly closed the door again, as she thought she might’ve got the wrong room. Sometimes people booked a late checkout, so maybe it was all a miss understanding. She quickly headed to the lobby and asked the staff if they could check room 403. But to Lauren’s surprise, the guests had left early in the morning, way before check-out time. Confused by this situation, Lauren returned to the room and slowly cracked open the door. “Hello? Housekeeping,” she said loudly, hoping to wake the person still sleeping. “Hello?” she asked again, but no response. Lauren’s heart was now beating in her chest. “What if,” she thought. “What if he’s dead?” This was a housekeeper’s worst nightmare. She carefully went into the room and slowly walked over to the person on the bed. But as she got closer, she noticed something was very off. “Hello?” As Lauren got closer to the bed, she noticed it wasn’t an adult in there, but a child. A little boy, no older than 10 years old, was lying in bed, fast asleep. “How is this possible?” she wondered aloud. All of the guests had to check out before 10 am, and it was almost 12 pm. Lauren couldn’t understand how the boy got there. She tried to wake him up, but he didn’t respond. He seemed exhausted, and his breathing was slow but steady. She started to get worried and decided to call the front desk. But the front desk was just as puzzled as her. No one knew who this boy was. Lauren didn’t want to call the police just yet. The boy seemed safe, so she didn’t want to raise panic by getting the police involved. So instead, she started asking the hotel staff and guests if they had seen anything or anyone suspicious, but to Lauren’s disappointment, no one had any information. Lauren couldn’t shake the feeling that she was meant to help him. So, she called in sick for the rest of the day and stayed with the boy. She brought her laptop with her so she could do a little research on her own, combing through local missing persons reports and searching social media for any clues. Sadly, Lauren’s search wasn’t much of a help. So, she checked on the boy again to see if he had woken up yet, but he was still sound asleep. She did find it very strange that the boy was in such a deep sleep. As if he had been up all night long.  Lauren looked at the boy as questions raced through her head. “Who are you?” she wondered. She leaned in to pull the blanket a bit more over the boy’s shoulder. But as she leaned in, she noticed something strange. There seemed to be something embroidered on the blanket. “G. J.”  Lauren looked a bit closer and wondered if that were the child’s initials. She pulled the blanket closer to her and suddenly heard a strange sound. Scared that she might’ve woken the child, Lauren took a step backward. But the child was still asleep. There was something else, though… Something stuck out from under the blanket. It looked like a little piece of paper. So, Lauren slowly lifted up the blanket of the boy. But when she read what was on the paper, she gasped loudly and immediately called the police. This had suddenly taken a very scary turn.  Lauren was very taken aback by the turn this situation had suddenly taken. The boy was safe inside the hotel, but he couldn’t stay there forever. He would wake up eventually, and what will they do then? She did ask the police to be discrete. There was no immediate danger, so she asked them to skip the sirens. After a while, Lauren heard a knock on her door. She looked through the peephole and saw two police officers standing in front of the door. She quietly opened the door and let the officers inside. “What seems to be the matter here, miss?” one of the officers asked. So, Lauren explained the situation.  The officers were confused by Lauren’s story. They had seen many missing children’s cases before, but they felt like this case wasn’t as serious. “His parents are probably somewhere in the hotel. Have you asked around?” Lauren was taken aback by the nonchalant demeanor of the officers. “Of course, I’ve asked around.”  Lauren’s mood instantly changed when she felt like the officers weren’t taking her seriously. They kept asking her what she did or did not do and seemed to take no further interest in the case. At least not until she showed the officers the note. That note changed it all.  The officers took the note from Lauren and told her they had to run some tests on it. Then, they would get back to her as soon as possible. Lauren expected them to take the child with them or at least arrange a temporary home, but the officers left in a hurry, leaving the child in her care.  This whole interaction with the police had gone really strangely so far. She just could not understand how they were not extremely worried about the condition of a young boy who had not woken up for hours! Did they know something that she did not? For now, she felt like she could not do a lot else than just look after this poor boy and make sure that he was okay. And who knows, maybe his parents would eventually come back to the room, and then she could give them a real piece of her mind. Then suddenly, something popped into Lauren’s mind Lauren could not believe that the officers had not thought about this herself. The security footage. The boy couldn’t have walked into the hotel without at least one of the cameras capturing him. Maybe if she could get a look at the footage, she could figure out what exactly had happened… The hotel had one central security room in which all the footage could be checked in real-time, but in reality, this simply did not happen often. The hotel was content just recording everything, and when something happened, they could always check back the footage. Which was ideal for Lauren here! The security guard with access to the room was only present from the evening to the early morning, as during the day, there was too much happening in the hotel for something to go unnoticed. So Lauren had to call and beg for him to come in earlier to help her here The security guard did not seem too keen at first, but when Lauren explained the situation a little better, he changed his mind. He was the father of 2 young boys himself, and he could not imagine just leaving them behind in a hotel room. Whoever was responsible for this needed to pay for their actions Because Lauren had no idea from what time the boy had been in the room by himself, they had to slowly play back the footage from the moment she walked into the room herself. And to her surprise, they actually had to wait quite a long time before seeing anything. The door of the room had seeming gone unopened for 4 whole days! This made little sense to Lauren as quests had checked out on the morning of the day she found the boy. Something was not adding up here, but it would not be long before Lauren managed to connect the dots Finally, something happened in the footage. 2 people walked out of the room. Lauren could not recognize the people in the footage, but she could make out a couple of the features. And those features immediately made her recognize something… The front desk employees had described the people who had checked out of the room that morning, and they looked nothing like the people Lauren saw in the footage. How many people were involved in this strange situation? When they played the footage back a little further they actually saw the same 2 people go into the hotel room. But this time, they had the little boy with them. They were actually carrying the child in their arms. And now that they had pinpointed the time, they could follow their way to the hotel. The time that the couple and young boy arrived at the hotel was actually around 3 o’clock at night. And, of course, around this time, they had encountered nobody in the hotel on their way to the room. There was not even anybody behind the welcome desk, and apparently, despite them not checking in, they already had a key. When they looked at more footage, Lauren found out that, most likely, the same people that had checked out that morning had checked in a week prior. But they had never even been in the room. They had to have given their keys to the people who had dropped off the boy. But why? Things started to fall into place a lot more for Lauren now, but she was still without any answers. She had checked the names and ID copies of the people who had checked into the room, but she could not find anything about them online. And so far, the police had not seemed interested in looking them up either. Lauren’s investigation hit a bit of a brick wall at this point, and she had only one place to go next. With the new information she had gathered, she tried to get in contact with the police again and hopefully get them to use her finding. And they were surprisingly more receptive to her this time around… In fact, they told her that multiple officers were already on their way back to the hotel to meet her and the young boy. They had a breakthrough in the case, as they called it, based on the note that Lauren had found under the boy’s blanket. Lauren was very excited. Finally, something was about to be done to help this young boy. She had already gone back to the room where the child was still soundly sleeping by the looks of it. The police were planning to meet her in the room to go over some of their findings and those of Laurens. When the police arrived, they once again showed 0 interest in the young boy and put all their focus on Lauren. They almost seemed to be excited to hear what Lauren had found out, and before she could get any information out of them, she had to tell them everything As Lauren was telling the officers more and more, the faces of the officers seemed to light up, and big smiles were going around. before she was done, some officers even started to high-five each other. Lauren could not understand what was happening and felt very offended that they were not taking her seriously by the looks of things. But the truth would turn out to be even worse. When the officers noticed that Lauren had no idea why they were reacting like this, one of them walked straight passed her toward the young boy. All the color instantly drained from Laurens’s face when he picked the boy up by his neck She wanted to attack the officers with everything she got, and it would only be seconds before she saw red. But everything stopped for Lauren when the officer told her, with a big smile on his face, that this was not a real doll but a realistic police training dummy! Lauren was stunned. A police training dummy? Did that mean that they were actually responsible for putting it here? And in a way, they were. Not those officers in particular, but one of their trainers would turn out to be responsible for all this madness The local police occasionally did special training sessions in which a trainer would set up a realistic case for them to solve, and this time it was a missing person case. The mission was to find this young boy who the trainer had hidden in the hotel room with a do not disturb sign. How the boy was brought in and who checked in and checked out of the room was all set up in advance, and the officers had actually gotten the assignment this morning. and because they were so focussed on that training case, they had not been really keen to help Lauren art first. But when she showed them the note, they suddenly realized that this was probably the boy they were meant to find. That is why they were so excited, as it now meant that they had solved a training case in record time.  Apparently, the owner of the hotel had been aware that this was happening and had agreed to it. But he had forgotten to communicate it to his staff members. But despite this, Lauren was still furious. She had been put through an emotional rollercoaster for nothing more than. training exercise Lauren ended up successfully suing the police department and was compensated well for emotional damages and suffering. Her boss was also fired in the end for not disclosing this information to the hotel personnel.