Author's Note: Thank you all so much for the feedback! I hope that you enjoy chapter two just as much.

Chapter Two: Analyzing the Evidence

Linda and Lawrence tried to remain calm, thinking of all the possible places Phineas could be at seven in the morning. The volume of Ferb's voice was enough to rattle the entire family, but Ferb was just a child. Phineas could have slept-walked or decided to go to a neighbor's house for some reason or another. They had to be rational about all of this and not resort to Candace's overactive imagination. There had not been a case of kidnapping in Danville in over eighty years. Phineas' couldn't have possibly been kidnapped.

Ferb then showed them the note, and a parent's worst nightmare came to life.

Perry was not allowed inside the boys' bedroom as the police searched it for evidence. This meant that he could not do any searching of his own, but when he had gone in the room earlier and read the note, he noticed that nothing in the room seemed out of place. There were no imprints in the carpet, the window ledge had no handprints on it, and it seemed like there was relatively no struggle from Phineas. This did not pinpoint who or what took Phineas, but it did leave the platypus with the notion that someone of advanced skill snatched him.

"Are you sure that you and your family had no enemies? Someone who held ill will towards any member for any reason?" one of the policemen with a notepad and pencil asked Linda and Lawrence. They looked at each other, and Perry couldn't help but notice how pale they were. Tears leaked out of the corner of Linda's eyes, but she kept her composure in front of her family.

Lawrence slowly shook his head. "No... We've always gotten along relatively well with everyone, and Phineas never had a problem with anyone." He looked down at Ferb who was standing in front of Candace. Candace had her hands on his shoulders, keeping the shivering boy upright. Ferb looked up at his father and mimicked his slow shake of the head, confirming that he did not know anyone who held ill will towards his brother.

Candace pulled Ferb back to lean against her front, giving him a small, comforting hug. She felt as if she could not let Ferb out of her sight. Losing one of her brothers was hard enough.

"Y-You'll find him?" she asked the police officer. "Right?"

The police officer looked over the Flynn-Fletcher family before he responded with, "We'll do our best."

With all due respect to the law enforcers of this city, Perry did not think their best would be enough.

Making his way to the backyard, Perry noted that there would be no way for him to use one of his secret passageways to get to his lab without being seen by someone. He needed to find out if Major Monogram had any information to offer him. The entire house had always been closely monitored by the agency's surveillance, so they had to have picked up something. He slightly wondered why Major Monogram or even Carl had not tried to contact him already. This was an emergency situation, and Perry desperately needed a course of action. He could not go searching blindly for Phineas!

He would if he had to, though.

"Whoa, what is that?" Perry scurried through the backdoor, listening to a police officer who was in the backyard. He was standing next to the wooden fence, pointing down at something on the ground. Another police officer walked over to see what he was talking about. Perry ventured closer to see too.

"It...looks like a hole," the other police officer responded, unsure of what his fellow officer was so intrigued about. "An animal probably dug it."

"Yeah, but it's pretty deep, and it seems very smooth." The police officer took a closer look at it, but he noticed that the other officer was just giving him an annoyed look. "Dogs usually make a mess when they dig, but there is no dirt scattered anywhere."

The other officer sighed. "Yeah, well, they have a pet platypus. It probably dug the hole, and anyway, it's just a hole. Be serious, man."

"Fine," the police officer said, walking with his partner to the other side of the yard. "It's just getting frustrating finding absolutely no evidence to go along with that note. That thing's the only proof that a kidnapping even took place!"

Perry stopped listening to the two officers and got a closer look at the hole. The police officer had been right when he said that there was no mess. The hole had been perfectly dug, and its design was in a pretty odd way. For one, there was no slant that signaled something was digging through to the other side of the fence. The hole went straight down about a foot deep, and there were three ridges that lined the hole. The bottom was not a point, but a perfect square.

He took offense that the police officers blamed him for this. As if any of them knew what a platypus dug like.

While the hole didn't seem to be dug for an animal to reach the other side of the fence, it still enabled Perry to look through the open bottom of the fence and see a bit of the other yard. He peered closely at the grassy land, trying to see if there was anything unusual about the other yard.

Two more identical holes about a couple meters apart from each other and the hole in front of Perry greeted his sight. These strange holes had to be related to the disappearance of his owner. Perry was willing to bet his life on it.

"Perry! There you are!"

Perry stopped focusing intently on the holes and made his eyes cross so that he was not staring in any particular direction. Candace and Ferb rushed over to him, and Ferb immediately scooped him up from the ground, holding him tightly in his arms.

Candace gave him a worried frown. "No running off today. You're going to stick like glue to Ferb and me. Whoever kidnapped Phineas could be waiting for a chance to take one of us, and the kidnapper could be some crazy, psycho that has something against families so he won't stop until—" Ferb had been gripping Perry even tighter now, but Perry could not blame him. He would have glared at Candace if he could have.

Candace rubbed the back of her head sheepishly, glad that she stopped her rambling before she traumatized her little brother any further. "Sorry, Ferb. Don't listen to me. I-I didn't mean—"

Ferb relaxed his grip on his brother's and his pet, signaling that he had accepted Candace's apology. Candace gave a defeated look, uncertain if she should open her mouth again. She looked off to the side, thinking of what to say, but a look of confusion suddenly dawned upon her face and she blinked. Annoyance quickly replaced her expression.

"Perry! Why are you digging holes in the backyard? Ugh! Now I have to fill that up later!" she complained, giving the platypus a short glare. "C'mon, let's go back inside before he decides to dig up any more of the yard."

Perry inwardly frowned at her accusation, but he noticed that Ferb seemed to be staring intently at the hole with the same curiosity Perry had. He did not stop to examine the hole, though, and instead followed Candace back inside the house.

Linda and Lawrence were sitting on their family couch in the living room, right under one of Perry's secret passageways. Perry wondered if he could get the family to leave for a second so that he could slip away to his lab, but unlike the other times when Perry snuck away from his family, Perry felt guilty about it this time. He knew that his disappearance would throw them into an even worse panic, and Ferb seemed to be in enough of a fragile state. As the boy's pet, he did not want to leave his side until Ferb was able to handle being on his own, but as a secret agent, he needed to leave his side so that he could utilize more advanced equipment that would allow him to track down Phineas.

Ferb carefully placed Perry on the ground, trusting that his platypus would not wander away from him. Perry moved himself a bit closer to his owner until his side was touching Ferb's leg, trying to let the boy know that he was here for him. Ferb absentmindedly patted his head, and Perry realized that perhaps Ferb was trying to comfort him too.

Anger boiled in the pit of Perry's stomach. How dare someone take away Phineas from them! How dare they enter Perry's domain and snatch someone who would never hurt a fly! Whoever took him would pay dearly. Perry did not take harm, emotional or physical, to his boys very well at all.

"Have they found anything?" Candace voiced, breaking through the tension. Linda tried to be brave and answer her daughter, but her voice got caught in her throat, and she quickly looked down while some more tears spilled freely from her eyes.

"No, not yet," Lawrence answered solemnly, putting a consoling arm around his wife. "We're not giving up hope. They'll find him."

Perry chattered, echoing Lawrence's words of reassurance. Even if the police did not find him, Perry would. He'd bring him back.

Candace paced in front of them, something that comforted her when situations felt out of her control. "There has to be something we could do. I need to call Stacy. We read all those detective stories together."

No one had the heart to tell Candace that fictional detective stories would not give her the information or help that she needed. Real detectives were already working the case. As she dialed Stacy's speed-dial number on her pink cellphone, Perry figured that Linda and Lawrence were letting her use this as a way to cope with her youngest brother's disappearance. Candace was and always would be a person of action. Perry had no doubt that she would not give up searching for Phineas until he was back in their house.

He had never respected the girl more so than he had just now.

"Candace is right," Linda spoke, causing the family members who were not preoccupied on the phone to turn their attention to her. "I'll call Charlene. Maybe the more the word gets out, the more help we could get. Someone in this city has to know something."

"Brilliant thinking, dear!" Lawrence grinned sincerely at his wife. "I'll go drive around and ask the citizens for any information they can offer us."

Linda nodded, hugging her husband tightly before she stood up from the couch. She whispered a "thank you" into his ear, giving her husband a small smile. She turned to Ferb and leaned down to speak to him.

"Ferb, please do not leave the house. I'm going to tell Candace to stay with you," she told him, and both already knew that Candace would not let Ferb out of her sight. As it was, she stood near the sliding glass doors that led to the back yard, talking on the phone to Stacy and glancing every so often at her Ferb as she did so.

Linda smiled for Ferb, trying to relinquish some of his fears, and gave him a soft peck on the top of his head. She then headed to the kitchen, dialing the number of her friend Charlene while reaching for their phone book that they kept in one of the kitchen cabinets.

"I guess we should do something too," Ferb quietly said to his pet platypus. He looked down, expecting to see Perry staring off into space, but there was no one there.

In the back of his mind, he heard the echo of his brother ask, "Hey, where's Perry?"


Perry looked from side to side down the hallway until he came upon one of the vents in the wall that was close to the floor. He whipped out his brown fedora and placed it on his head before he effortlessly lifted the cover up and slipped inside the vent, immediately finding himself sliding down a curved tube. In no time he popped out of the tube and landed perfectly on top of his work chair. The screen in front of him flashed blue before it focused on the top half of Major Monogram.

"Agent P! We have been trying to contact you all morning, but it seems like something has been jamming our signals since last night," Major Monogram reported, putting Perry's mind at ease that the agency had been trying to contact him at least. Major Monogram continued to relay the information he had, ordering Carl to bring up videos and pictures from last night. Perry frowned as each video and picture came up distorted, black-screened, or simply as white-and-black static.

"As you can see, none of our technology was able to capture anything during the boy's disappearance." Major Monogram looked away from Perry for a moment, knowing that his top-agent would not like hearing this. "Whoever kidnapped Phineas knew about your secret identity and had the capabilities to get past our system."

Perry's eyes widened. Whoever kidnapped Phineas had a connection to him? It was Perry who had put Phineas in danger?

Major Monogram cleared his throat, snapping Perry out of a state of cold horror. "We have been keeping an eye out for any unusual activity, and it turns out that Doofenshmirtz has been stealing hundreds of magazines from around the Tri-State Area."

Perry recalled the strange letters on the note the kidnapper left. They had been taken from various magazines.

Perry saw red.

He barely heard Major Monogram's voice as he grabbed his jetpack and zoomed out of his lab with only one thing in mind: Destroying Doofenshmirtz.