A Horse with No Name Pt. 01

"I told you his name is Mike Sullivan. I don't know what kind of scam you two are trying to pull here, but it is not going to work."

"This is no scam," Brian said. "Mr. Sullivan suffered a traumatic brain injury a few months ago and is suffering from amnesia. He has no memory of his life before the injury."

"That's bull shit, and you know it."

"No sir, it's the truth," Brian said.

"Well that's just too fucking bad for him then, isn't it? So where does that leave me? If he can't remember anything how do I get back what he took from me? This is just fucking great. So, how did he remember how to get here?"

Brian got Mr. Stanley to listen to him as he told the story of how I was brought into the hospital with no identification and no memory of what happened or who I was. Brian told him about how I had dreamt of the phone number and that we had no idea if it was significant, so we came down to Raleigh to find out. Brian ended by saying "We hoped that you might be able to help him find out who he was."

Mr. Stanly sat back down and stared at me for a while. "So, if he can't remember anything I can't get my property back and if I can't get my property back, why should I help him?"

Somehow I managed to come out of the fog I was in and contribute to the conversation. "If you won't help me, then there's no way I will be able to help you get what you want. Can you just tell me what it is that I did while I was here, what was it that I stole?" I said.

For a minute all Mr. Stanley did was rock back and forth in his chair and stare at me.

"Okay, I'll answer your questions, but just remember if you try to pull some bullshit on me I will have the police in here before you know what happened.

"Mike worked here for six years as a software designer. He was my top designer and team leader. Before he took off, he was working on chained integration applications that we call Interapp. The product would have put SA on the map and probably would have gotten some of the mega software companies interested in buying Stanley Applications in a deal that could have been worth a billion dollars.

"The Friday before Mike left he told me he was done with the last of the applications necessary for Interapp to work and we could start beta testing the next week. When I came in Monday morning, I had an email from him saying that he was leaving the company because he had a much better offer out west."

Mr. Stanley turned his attention to me and said, "I treated you like a son, and you just left and took all of your work with you. I trusted you, and you fucked me. My guess is that you sold Interapp to some software company in India. When I find out which company has Interapp, they will wish they had never met you."

"Exactly when did you get Mr. Sullivan's resignation email?" Brian asked.

Mr. Stanley turned away from me and looked at Brian again. "Exact date? Hang on a minute. I saved the email he sent me as evidence for my lawsuit." Mr. Stanley used his computer to pull up the email. "Here it is. Mike wrote the email on January 25th, that was Sunday, and I received it on Monday the 26th."

"Do you know where Mike sent the note from? I mean, could he have sent that note from Pennsylvania?" Brian said.

"No, no. Mike had to have sent the note from here." Mr. Stanley said. "We use a proprietary email server here so you can't send an email from our server unless you use one of our company computers. Mike sent the note from his work laptop, and he left it here when he skipped town, but he took all his work with him and deleted all the data and project files from his computer and our server. We tried to recover the data, but Mike somehow managed to make the data unrecoverable."

"Could I get a look at that email?" Brian said.

Mr. Stanley turned his computer toward Brian so he could see the screen. "It says here that the note was sent at 10:36 AM on the 25th. So Mike had to come into the office on the 25th to send this note, delete all of his work files from the server and his laptop and then leave his computer here, right?" Brian said.

Mr. Stanley just nodded and said, "That's right."

"Do you have security cameras?"

"Not yet. We only moved into this building last November and haven't finished updating building security yet, but we know that Mike used his badge to enter the building that morning. We record all badge entries in our security files."

"Can we get a print out of that email?" Brian asked.

Mr. Stanley hit a couple of keys, and the printer on his credenza started. Mr. Stanley handed the printout of the email Brian.

"How do you know Mike and why are you helping him?" Mr. Stanley asked Brian. "If you are here to help him cover up his crime I will also sue you."

"Brian and I became friends while he was in the hospital. He's got no one else to help him," Brian said.

I was starting to come out of my fog when I had an idea. "Any chance I could get a copy of my human resource file?" I asked.

"What do you need that for?"

"That will give me some background information about who I am. My age, where I lived, where I went to college, things like that," I said.

Mr. Stanley gave me a menacing look, but made a call and told someone to make a copy of my HR file and take it down to reception. When he got off the phone, Mr. Stanley said, "You can pick it up at the reception desk on your way out." It was apparent from his tone that we were being dismissed.

"Thank you for your time, Mr. Stanley. We will be in touch if we need anything more from you or if we find your missing property."

When we got back to the car, Brian said that he wanted to check into our hotel and make some phone calls. He said that he needed to call Chief Pasiak to bring him up to speed and then he wanted to call his wife. He suggested that I call Kate and tell her what we learned.

Chapter 11 - The Investigation Makes Headway

The Fairfield Inn, where we were staying was located less than a mile from the offices of SA. When we checked in, Brian said that he would need a couple of hours to finish the calls he needed to make and then we would go get something to eat."

I spent the first half hour in my room reading my HR file. There wasn't much in the file. It had my full name and birth date; Michael John Sullivan, born October 11, 1987. I attended college at Rochester Institute of Technology in Rochester, New York, and graduated in 2009. I started working for SA that July. There was nothing to indicate where I came from, but there was a home address for me in Raleigh. There were also six years of performance reviews and dates of promotions in my file.

Using a tracphone, I purchased before leaving Brodricksburg; I called Kate. When Kate answered, she said, "How was the trip down to Raleigh?"

The impression I got was that Kate was afraid to ask me if the trip had been a success.

"It was fine," I said. "Being on the plane was a little strange. It felt familiar, but I have no memories of ever being on a plane."

"Ben did you..."

I stopped Kate there, "My name is not Ben, it's Mike Sullivan."

"Oh my God, you found out who you are," Kate almost yelled into the phone. "You must be so excited."

I told Kate about our visit to SA and how Sonja Anderson and Mr. Stanley both recognized me. I left out the part about Mr. Stanley accusing me of being a thief. I didn't want to ruin Kate's opinion of me and have her to think less of me.

"So, Michael Sullivan, when are you coming home?" Kate said.

"Well, it won't be for a while. So far, all I have is a name and what I did for a living, but I still have way more questions than answers. I'll call you tomorrow and tell you what else we find out."

We talked for a while longer, Kate telling me about her work and Megan's day camp experiences. When the call ended, I wanted to tell Kate that I loved her, but I didn't. I had never said those words to her, although I was sure that I was in love with her. Knowing my name didn't change anything, I still didn't know very much about myself other than I might be a thief. Until I knew more about who I was, I didn't feel that I had a right put the burden of telling how I felt on her.

Later, over dinner, I asked Brian if he believed that I took the Interapp files that Mr. Stanley accused me of stealing.

"Do you think you did?" Brian asked.

"I don't know. If I did, like everything else, I don't remember doing it," I said.

Brian smiled at me and said, "You didn't"

"I didn't? How do you know?"

"Were you not listening when I was talking to Mr. Stanley? According to him you were in your office Sunday morning, January 25th, and sent your resignation email at 10:36 AM that morning. On Sunday, January 25th you were at Brodricksburg Memorial Hospital recovering from brain surgery. I guess that whoever is responsible for your head injury stole the project you were working on and wanted to make you disappear to cover his or her tracks."

"I guess after Mr. Stanley accused me of stealing the files I was in a bit of a fog. I heard the two of you talking, but I wasn't listening to what you and Mr. Stanley were saying. I don't remember Mr. Stanley apologizing to me when you explained to him that I could not have done it," I said.

"That's because I didn't explain that to him. The less Mr. Stanley knows about our investigation, the less he can tell anyone else.

"So, what do we do next?" I asked.

"I called Chief Pasiak and asked him to contact the Raleigh Police Department and arrange for us to meet with one of their detectives in the morning," Brain said.

"Couldn't we have just gone to the police on our own?"

"It's a courtesy thing, and it just makes it easier to get cooperation. Now Raleigh PD knows we are coming and they will assign someone to work with us. Now, why don't we finish dinner, have a couple of beers and then call it a night?"

Wednesday morning, after a breakfast of a Belgian waffle and a cup of coffee at the Fairfield Inn, Brian and I went to meet with a detective from the Raleigh Police Department. We met Detective Sergeant Jack Monroe at the Hargett Street station. Detective Monroe was a short, stout man with a bushy mustache, which was the only hair on his head. When he met us at the front desk, Detective Monroe was chewing on a toothpick, which I observed as the day went on, he only removed from his mouth so he could replace it with a new one. Detective Monroe led us to a conference room and then offered us a cup of coffee or a cold drink. Brian and I both declined.

"Well then, let's get started," Detective Monroe said. "My chief only told me that the two of you are down here investigating an attack on is it, Mr. Sullivan or Mr. Franklin, which took place in Pennsylvania. He told me he wanted me to work with you, so why are you down here if the attack happened up in Pennsylvania?"

Brian said, "Let me start at the beginning, so you get the whole picture. At approximately 2:50 AM on Sunday, January 25th of this year, Mr. Sullivan was found standing naked in the middle of a country road during a snowstorm by two Brodricksburg police officers. The officers put Mr. Sullivan in their patrol car and transported him to Brodricksburg Memorial Hospital.

"Mr. Sullivan was admitted to the hospital suffering from hypothermia and a head injury. His skull was fractured which caused a traumatic brain injury or TBI. The TBI caused some localized brain damage, which has left Mr. Sullivan with amnesia. Mr. Sullivan has no memories of his life before the time of his head injury. Ben Franklin was just a name we used before we were able to identify Mr. Sullivan."

"No memories at all from before your injury?" Detective Monroe said.

"None at all," I said.

"The doctors at the hospital determined that the injury to Mr. Sullivan's head were not the result of an accident. It has been determined that the injury was caused by blunt force trauma. So, we were dealing with a case of attempted murder."

"Okay, so how do we fit into this Captain?" Detective Monroe asked.

Brian laid out everything we had learned. He told Detective Monroe about me dreaming the phone number and how that connected us to Stanley Applications. Then Brain told him about our visit to SA and finding out that I had worked there for six years and that I had sent an email resigning from the company on January 25th. Brian explained about the theft of Interapp that I was developing for SA and how it was not possible for me to have taken the files.

"Right now my working theory is that whoever stole the files works at SA and that individual must have had help from at least one other person," Brian said. The person responsible for this had to know what Mike was working on and what it might be worth to another company. I believe that Mike was abducted here in Raleigh and driven to Brodricksburg, where he was stripped naked and struck on the head and left to die in the middle of a snow-covered field. It was just serendipity that Mike managed to get out into the road just as the patrol car was approaching. Otherwise, he would have died that night.

"The email stating that he was resigning from SA and leaving town was designed to make sure that nobody ever reported Mike missing. That worked up to a point. We were unable to identify Mike through missing person reports, fingerprints or DNA searches. The one thing the perpetrators didn't count on was that Mike didn't die."

"Why do you think that the perpetrators took Mike to Brodricksburg?"

"I don't know if that was their original destination. I suspect that the assailants just wanted to get Mike as far away from here as they could and then bury his body, but when they ran into the snowstorm that night, it caused them to change their plans," Brian said.

"That all sounds plausible. You know that if Mike was abducted from Raleigh and taken to Pennsylvania we'd have to get the Feds involved," Detective Monroe said.

"I've thought that myself, but I would like to hold off on that until we can investigate this a little more, ourselves. I want to be able to charge those responsible with attempted murder in Brodricksburg, and I would hope that you could charge them with assault and unlawful imprisonment, then we can let the Feds charge them with kidnapping. When the time comes, I have a contact at the FBI office in Philadelphia I think we can work with."

The room was quiet for a minute, so I asked, "So what do we do next?"

"Wasn't there a home address listed in your HR file? I think we should check that out."

"What's the address?" Detective Monroe said.

The address listed in my HR file was on Stone Street, in Raleigh. Detective Monroe entered the address into a laptop computer he had with him.

"It says here that the house belongs to Mr. Sullivan. The property taxes are current," Detective Monroe said. "Stone Street is only ten or fifteen minutes from here, so why don't we head on over there? I'll get my car, and you can follow me."

End of Part 1