A Horse with No Name

A Horse With No Name - Part 2

Chapter 12 - The House on Stone Street

The houses on Stone Street were older homes, mostly built in the nineteen twenties and thirties and were all well kept. The house with the address from my HR file was a red brick two-story colonial. It was similar in age to the neighbor's, and like the others, the exterior of the house was in excellent condition. The windows all looked like they had been updated with new energy efficient glass and none of the woodwork needed painting. I did note that the lawn around the house was overgrown and full of tall weeds. I made all of these observations without understanding how I knew about the ages of the homes in the neighborhood or how I knew that the windows had been replaced in my house. I made a mental note to record the incident in my notebook.

My driveway was on the left side of the house and went around to the back. In the backyard was a standalone one-car garage. Detective Monroe was already out of his car and trying to open the back door to my house as Brian and I approached.

"The door is locked. I'll need to get a pry bar from my car so we can get the door opened," Detective Monroe said.

"Don't we need to have a search warrant to break into the house," I asked.

Brian and Detective Monroe both started laughing. Brian put his hand on my shoulder and said, "Mike, it's your house, you don't need a warrant to break into your own house unless you don't want us to go inside, then Detective Monroe would have to get a warrant."

"I guess that was stupid, but I'm having trouble with the concept that this is my house right now. Let's get the door opened."

While we waited for Detective Monroe to return with his pry bar, I peeked through the window to see what was on the other side of the door. It appeared to be a laundry and mud room combination. I could see the washer and dryer against the left side wall. The back wall had a built-in coat rack and bench for removing boots and shoes. Some coats and jackets were hanging in the built-in and a pair of boots and a pair of running shoes were on the floor beneath the bench. Next to the coat rack was the door that led into the house. That door was opened, and beyond it, I could see part of the kitchen.

Detective Monroe came back with his pry bar and popped the door open, then turned to me and said, "When you fix that door you are going to need to install a better lock than that one.

"Now before we go in, you need to know that normally you would not be allowed to be this involved with the investigation. I am hoping that by allowing you to come with us that you will see something that might trigger some memory of what happened to you."

We started to go inside, and Detective Monroe told me to wait in the laundry room until he and Brian had a chance to clear the house. I wasn't sure what that meant, but I did as instructed.

I watched as Brian and Detective Monroe looked around the kitchen and then proceeded farther into the house. When the two of them returned to the kitchen ten minutes later, Brian turned to me and said, "Looks like this is where it all started."

"What makes you think that?"

"From the looks of the kitchen we can tell that you keep you keep it neat and clean," Brian said. "Everything is where it belongs except for the dishes on the table. It looks like you left a half-eaten breakfast on the table and the sludge in the bottom of your coffee pot would indicate that there was coffee in the pot the last time you left the house. The person that lived in this house would not have left a mess in the kitchen unless he didn't have a choice. Also, there is a home office upstairs that may have been the site of a struggle."

Before we left the kitchen, I heard a low humming noise. Brian and Detective Monroe both looked over toward the refrigerator. Detective Monroe went over and opened the refrigerator door and said: "The electricity is on, the refrigerator is running."

I said, "So?"

"You have been away from here for more than six months, and the power is still on. You would expect that Duke Energy would have shut the power off after two or three months of non-payment."

It turned out that the water was also still on.

Detective Monroe told me not to touch anything as we moved further into the house. Aside from the kitchen, there were three other rooms on the first floor. The formal dining room, the living room and a family room with an entertainment center with a large screen television. It didn't appear that anything was out of place in those rooms.

Detective Monroe stopped at the bottom of the stairway and pointed at the carpet runner on the bottom step. "There are some blood drops on the stairs so be careful not to step in any of them on the way upstairs."

There were five rooms off the hallway on the second floor. There were three bedrooms, one was a home office, and the last was a bathroom. Two of the bedrooms were pretty standard sized about 12 feet by 12 feet, with the small bathroom between them. The third bedroom was a master suite consisting of a large bedroom and a large bathroom. The master suite was obviously the result of a remodeling project. Somehow, I knew that houses built in the twenties didn't have master suites. That was just one more thing I understood without knowing how. The remodel looked recent. I wondered if it had been done before I lived there or did I have the work done? The question on my mind was 'how could I afford to live in a house like that?'

Looking around the master suite I noticed a framed photograph of an attractive brunette woman. I was staring at the picture when Brian came up beside me and said," Pretty girl, do you remember her?"

"I am trying, but no. I don't."

It wasn't until we went to check out the home office that I noticed that anything was amiss. The office was the same size as the smaller bedrooms. There wasn't much in the way of furniture in the room, just a couple of office chairs, a table with a printer on it and a large antique oak roll-top desk. The desk was positioned between two windows on the back wall. The roll top was opened and whatever had been inside the desk had been thrown on the floor. To the left was a door that led to a small closet. The closet door was opened, and I didn't see anything in the closet.

I sat down at the roll top desk. I could not explain why, but that desk was somehow familiar to me. Without turning to look at Brian or Detective Monroe, I said, "I remember this desk. It is the only thing in this house that I know belongs to me."

"Do you think it's important to the case?" Detective Monroe asked.

"I have no idea. It's just that this desk is the first thing that has made me feel connected to this house."

There was a small trophy made up of three small gold colored baseball bats with the inscription

2002 Section III Champions

engraved on it, lying on its side on the desk. There was also a baseball with several signatures on it, on the floor. I guessed that the ball was supposed to sit on top of the trophy. Without touching the ball, I read the names I could see, but didn't recognize any of them. Did the trophy belong to me and should I know the names written on the ball? That was just another puzzle for me to figure out.

I was turning away from the desk when something on the floor caught my eye. It was a picture frame laying face down surrounded by broken glass. I reached to pick it up, but Brian stopped me. "Detective Monroe, you got any gloves on you?" Brain said.

"Yeah, what have you got?"

"We want to see the picture in this frame." Brian said.

Detective Monroe put on a latex glove and picked the frame up and turned it over. The picture was of me standing with my arm around the same girl that was in the photo in my bedroom. We were dressed casually in jeans and tee shirts, and she was looking up at me, smiling.

Brian came looked at the picture and said, "Isn't that the same girl?"

"It is," I said. "I guess we will need to find out who she is, but how?"

"Looks like she was your girlfriend. Maybe someone at SA that knows you can tell us who she is," Brian suggested.

A few minutes later Brian said, "Look around and tell me if you notice anything missing."

When I turned to Brian, he was standing next to the table with the printer on it. "How can I know if anything is missing if I don't know what was here, to begin with," I said.

Brian pointed at the printer. "You have a printer on this table here and a computer display on the floor under the desk, but there is no computer. You can see the footprint of a computer tower on the carpet next to the desk. Somebody removed your computer."

I was still having trouble connecting the dots. "Why take the computer?" I said.

"If the plan was to steal the Interapp program to sell it to another software company, it makes sense that the perpetrators would want your computer in case you had another copy of your Interapp files stored on it," Brian said.

"Captain Hobbs, you want to take a look at this. Looks like cast off." Detective Monroe said as he was looking at the wall on the other side of my desk.

"What's cast off," I asked.

"It's a blood splatter," Brian said. "It must have happened when they hit you in the head the first time."

"It's time for me to call the crime scene techs, I'll be back in a few minutes," Detective Monroe said.

Detective Monroe was gone for about ten minutes while Brian and I continued looking around the office. When Detective Monroe reappeared, he said, "We're lucky today. The techs aren't busy, so they will be here right after lunch. While I was outside another question occurred to me; where is your mail?"

"What about my mail?" I said.

Brian nodded his head, "You were gone for over six months. What happened to all of the mail that would have accumulated over that time?"

"I checked the mailbox out front, and it's empty. We need to find an old bill or envelop with your address on it," Detective Monroe said. He could see the confusion on my face and continued. Maybe your mail goes to a post box somewhere, if not someone either stopped your mail or is coming by and picking it up."

"Do you think the neighbors might have seen anything going on over here," I said.

"Already got that covered. I've got an officer on the way to interview the neighbors as we speak. "Now I want to go out and check the garage before the crime scene guys get here," Detective Monroe said.

"Before we go downstairs I want to get a picture of the photograph in Mike's bedroom," Brian said. "We'll need it to find out who she is."

Brian took the picture with his cell phone and then the three of us went back downstairs and back through the kitchen. I was standing in the doorway of the laundry room watching Detective Monroe as he walked over and said, "Let's get this door opened."

Without thinking about what I was doing, I reached over to a switch on the wall next to the door and pushed it, and the garage door began to open.

"How did you know where the garage door opener was?" Brian asked.

"I don't know."

Sitting in the garage was a 2012 Toyota Camry. Once again I was struck by the fact that I was able to identify the year, make and model but I didn't know if the car was mine or someone else put it in my garage.

"Is that your car?" Detective Monroe asked me.

"I don't know, but if it isn't why is it in my garage?"

"Could that be the Toyota Camry you saw driving away in the snowstorm?" Brian said.

"I don't know, but I did say it was a Camry didn't I?"

Detective Monroe pulled a pair of latex gloves from his pocket and put them on then opened the driver side door and looked around the inside for a minute. Before stepping away from the car Detective Monroe reached down by the driver's seat and pulled the trunk release.

When Detective Monroe came around to the back of the car, he said that there were fast food containers and wrappers, and drink cups on the floor and that the keys were in the ignition. Detective Monroe lifted the trunk lid and the three of us looked inside, "Looks like we found the mother lode," Detective Monroe said.

In the trunk, I saw some clothes rolled up in a ball, a bag of zip ties, a roll of duct tape, an aluminum baseball bat and a short handled shovel.

Detective Monroe went to his car and did something on his computer then came back and said, "I ran the plate on the car, and it belongs to you, Mike. It looks like they used your car to transport you to Pennsylvania."

Just then a police car pulled into the driveway, and two officers got out and walked over to Detective Monroe. He spoke to them for a few minutes. After that one of the officers walked out to the street, and the other got back in the squad car.

"I sent one of the officers to canvas the neighborhood and the other officer will wait here till the crime scene techs arrive," Detective Monroe said.

"It's time for lunch. You guys like authentic barbeque?" Detective Monroe asked.

Brian said that he did, and I said that I didn't know.

"I am going to take you to The Pit. It's the best barbeque anywhere around here," Detective Monroe said. I can't say that it was the best pork barbeque I ever had, but it was the best I could remember.

After lunch, we went back to the house and just stood around waiting for the crime scene techs to finish their job.

I was stressed out and depressed by everything that was happening on this trip. I kept hoping that Brian and Detective Monroe would find the one clue that would solve the mystery of my life, but it wasn't happening. Everything about the investigation seemed to take so long. It had already been over six hours since we arrived at the house in the morning. Part of the problem for me was that the techs were collecting evidence and talking to Brian and Detective Monroe about what they were finding, but no one was telling me anything.

I felt my attention drifting. I thought about Kate and how much I was missing her. When I was with Kate and Megan, I didn't feel so stressed or depressed. They were my anchors; they gave me the strength to carry on. Here I was in a beautiful house with what I would guess was expensive furnishings and I felt like I didn't belong there. It just seemed impossible that this was part of my life.

When the crime scene techs finished in the house, I watched them swarm over the car. From the trunk, they removed a pair of pants, a sweatshirt, underpants, undershirt, socks, shoes, and put them in plastic bags. They did the same with the duct tape and the zip ties. They found a wallet in the pants pocket, and it contained my driver's license, two credit cards, and a Red Cross blood donor's card with my name on them, but no money. Those items were also bagged.

One of the techs lifted the baseball bat from the trunk and examined it. Then the tech showed the baseball bat to Detective Monroe and said, "Looks like blood and some hair on this. We'll see if it matches Mr. Sullivan's blood type. If it does, we'll do a DNA match as well." The tech put the baseball bat in a large plastic bag and handed it to another tech who, wrote something on the bag and put it in the back of their van with the other evidence they had gathered. They did the same with the shovel.

The tech continued talking to Detective Monroe. "These guys left a lot of evidence in the car. Let's hope the perp left his fingerprints on the baseball bat. We may be able to get some prints and DNA from the food wrappers and drink cups, also. We dusted the steering wheel and dashboard for prints and there are a lot of them, mostly partials and smudges but we'll check them out. We have everything that was in the trunk including the carpet, so I don't think the car has anything left to tell us."

"That's all we can do today," Detective Monroe said. "Now we let the crime lab do their thing and see what comes of that. "One of the techs found and envelop with your name and an address for a PO Box. Tomorrow we can go retrieve your mail."

"What are we going to do now?" I asked Brian.

"Let's take a ride back over to SA and see if anyone there can tell us who your girlfriend is," Brian said.

Chapter 13 - Lisa Spenser

We arrived at SA a few minutes after five o'clock and found the parking lot nearly empty. When we entered the building, instead of seeing the receptionist we met the previous day there was a man dressed in a security guards uniform. The guard didn't have any idea who I was and said that Mr. Stanley had already left for the day. Brian and I were about to head back to the car when the elevator doors opened, and Sonja Anderson stepped out into the lobby.

Sonja was heading for the door when Brian called out to her. "Ms. Anderson, could we have a minute of your time."

Sonja turned around, and when she saw who was talking to her, she came straight over to us. "Mike, I could not believe it was you when you came in yesterday," Sonja said. Mr. Stanley told me about your accident. You really can't remember anything before your injury? "

"No."

"You don't remember me at all?"

"Sorry, no," I said.

"You don't need to be sorry. It's not your fault you don't remember. It's just so hard to believe because we worked together on so many projects while you were here. You and Lisa used to come to our house for dinner and parties."

"Lisa?"

"Oh God, you don't remember Lisa either? Lisa Spenser? The two of you were engaged before you took off. I don't know if Lisa will ever forgive you for the way you left. It took her a few weeks before she would believe that you stole your project and left without talking to her."

I don't know what made me angrier, that I may have broken someone's heart or that everyone believes that I am a thief because of someone else's crime. I looked at Brian hoping to get some help from him.

"Sonja, was anyone else working with Mike on this project?" Brian said. What I mean is who else knew how valuable Mike's project was?"

"Well, Mr. Stanley of course, George, me and the marketing manager. I guess there were a couple of others who helped from time to time. Why?"

"Who is George?" I asked.

"George Bartlett. He was your best friend.

"Does Lisa work here?" Brian said.

"No. Lisa is a manager over at Crabtree Mall."

"Do you know how to get a hold of Lisa?"

"I've got her number on my phone," Sonja said. "What's going on? Why are you asking so many questions?"

"I'm just trying to help Mike put his life back together. Do you think Lisa knows that Mike is back in town?"

"I am sure George must have told her last night," Sonja said.

"Why would George tell Lisa about me?"

"George was a friend to both of you. He spent a lot of time trying to help Lisa after you left."

"Do you think you could give Lisa a call and ask her to meet us somewhere?" Brian asked. We need to talk to her. Tell her we will buy her dinner."

"Where do you want her to meet you?"

"I don't know, where do you think she would be comfortable meeting us?" Brian said.

"How about 42nd Street Oyster Bar. You two use used to go there quite often," Sonja said.

Sonja got her phone out and called Lisa. I couldn't hear their conversation, but in the end, Lisa agreed to meet us. "She will meet you there at seven o'clock," Sonja said. Before we left, Sonja gave Brian directions to the restaurant.

Brian and I went back to the Fairfield Inn so that he could make some calls and do some work on his computer. He said that he was going to have to call the FBI because being abducted and transported across state lines makes it a federal crime. We agreed to leave for the restaurant at 6:15.

When I got back to my room, I stressed over whether I should call Kate. I don't think she would be happy to find out I was engaged. I didn't want to upset her, and I didn't want to lie to her. I didn't think I could pull that off anyway. In the end, I didn't call.