Page 30 of Guess Again
Cherryview, Wisconsin Friday, July 25, 2025
THE FOLLOWING DAY, ETHAN PULLED UP TO THE BIG HOUSE ON LAKE Okoboji and parked in the driveway.
He hadn’t called ahead.
With his backpack strapped over a shoulder, he walked to the front entrance—a gargantuan set of wooden French doors—and rang the bell.
When no one answered, he rang again.
Another minute passed before he heard an unidentifiable noise emanating from some place off in the distance. He backed away from the front porch and listened. It was a steady back-and-forth clanking that was unexplainably irritating. He followed a stone-lined walkway around the house. The clinking grew louder with each step as he progressed toward the back.
As he emerged through a canopy of jasmine bushes, Lake Okoboji came into view.
The source of the racket also became apparent.
Christian Malone and three others were playing pickleball on what looked like a newly poured court that overlooked the lake.
The four players stood mesmerizingly close to one another and banged a yellow wiffle ball back and forth across the net.
The noise from the paddles hitting the ball was loud and obnoxious, and Ethan wondered if the neighbors complained. But enough acreage surrounded Christian Malone’s mansion for the nails-on-the-chalkboard clatter to dissipate before reaching adjacent homes.
Ethan approached the court as Christian served the ball, waited for the return, and then began a new rally that consisted of a flurry of back-and-forth smashes until Christian ended it with an overhead volley that sent the ball into the hydrangeas and ended the game.
The players tapped paddles across the net before Christian turned and smiled when he saw Ethan.
“My favorite doctor is making a house call!”
Christian raised his hands as if under arrest.
“Don’t worry, Doc.
I’m drinking water, I promise.”
He ran to the side of the court and lifted a Yeti tumbler to his lips to take a long swallow.
Ethan laughed.
“I didn’t come to check on your water intake.
I need some help from my favorite retired tech guru.”
Christian looked at his pickleball friends, all of whom appeared to be in their seventies or beyond, and pointed at Ethan.
“This is the doctor who helped with my kidney stone a few weeks ago.
Saved me from surgery.”
“I didn’t even do that.
Actually, he passed it before I could do much for him.”
“Ah,”
Christian said, “the sign of a good doctor is humility.
Can’t even accept my gratitude for helping me narrowly escape the operating room.”
Christian turned to his friends.
“Same time tomorrow?”
Everyone agreed and headed to the driveway and their cars.
When his friends were gone, Christian turned to Ethan.
“Sorry to play up the kidney stone thing.
I told them I was an eyelash away from needing surgery.
Pickleball with those guys is cutthroat.
I need any advantage I can get.
If they think I’m recovering from some ailment, they’ll go easy on me.”
“Those guys looked like they were all in their seventies and twice your age.”
“Age makes no difference in pickleball.
They’ll butcher me up and serve me raw if given the chance.
I’ve played the sick card for a couple of weeks, but I guess the jig is up now.”
“Sorry to out you.”
Christian finished his water and waved his hand.
“No worries.
The kidney stone angle helped me win a few games.
It’s all good.
So what brings you by?”
“I need some help with something I’m working on.”
“Come on in.”
Ethan followed Christian inside and slipped his backpack off his shoulder, setting it on the kitchen stool.
He unzipped the top and removed a plastic evidence bag.
Inside was Callie Jones’s cell phone that Pete Kramer had retrieved from evidence.
No one had laid hands on it for ten years.
“What do we have here?”
Christian said, inching closer to get a better look.
“Is that an evidence bag?”
“It is.”
Christian raised his right eyebrow.
“It’s a long story.”
“Try me.”
Ethan nodded, knowing he’d have to come clean if he wanted Christian’s help.
“You and I have a lot in common.”
“Oh yeah? You have recurrent kidney stones and like pickleball?”
“No.
You left your previous life behind for something different.
I did the same.”
“I left Silicon Valley because it was going to kill me if I stayed.”
Ethan nodded.
“I used to be a detective, and I left that world for the same reason.”
Ethan saw Christian lift his chin slightly, understanding but wanting more.
“I was a special agent with Wisconsin’s Division of Criminal Investigation.”
Christian angled his head as he worked through it all.
“You left law enforcement .
.
.
to be a doctor?”
“I did.
Because if I stayed it would have killed me.
I used to investigate kid crimes, and I saw too much violence against young people.
Things I was never able to stop.
The best I could do was hunt down the people who committed the crimes and bring them to justice. After a while, it stopped being terribly satisfying because in the wake of that tiny victory was still a dead kid. So I retired, went to medical school, and now I try to help people before they die.”
Christian pouted his lips.
“So what are you doing with a phone sealed in a plastic evidence bag?”
“I’m doing an old friend a favor.
Ten years ago, my previous partner worked a missing persons case that went cold.
As sort of a last ditch effort to find answers, he and the governor have asked me to take a look at the case and see if I find anything.”
“And did you?”
“I’m hoping you can tell me.”
Ethan pointed at the evidence bag.
“Back in 2015, a girl named Callie Jones disappeared from right here in Cherryview, Wisconsin.
Last time she was seen was leaving The Crest.”
Ethan pointed to the lake through the floor-to-ceiling windows.
“Investigators found her cell phone and her boat, along with drops of her blood, at North Point Pier the next morning.
This is the girl’s phone.”
Christian placed the tips of his fingers together and flexed them, clearly anticipating that his computer skills were about to be called upon.
“What do you need?”
“Agents with the DCI did a search on the phone, found some incoming and outgoing calls registered to a prepaid cell phone.
That lead never went anywhere, other than to suggest that Callie Jones was in contact with someone who wanted to stay anonymous.”
“Sounds suspicious.”
“It is.
And I need your help with a couple of things.
First, Callie made a bunch of calls and sent a string of text messages to this prepaid number.
The tech guys at the DCI can see the footprints of the text threads to know that they existed, but were never able to recover the actual texts.
They think she used an app that automatically erased the texts after a set period of time. I need to know if you can find them.”
“The texts?”
“Yeah.”
“Maybe.
If I get into the guts of the phone.
What’s the second issue?”
“Last night I did some digging and looked into the location of where calls originated from in the six months leading up to her disappearance.
Nothing stood out except one call that pinged a cell tower in Chicago.
She made the call two days before she went missing, and I want to know if there’s any way to figure out where, exactly, she was in Chicago when she made that call.”
Christian squinted his eyes and took a moment to process the question.
The man was clearly in his element.
“I’d have to get my hands on the SIM card.”
“We can do that.
You just have to wear gloves.”
Christian pointed at the phone.
“Bring that with you and come into my office.”
Ethan grabbed the evidence bag that contained Callie Jones’s cell phone and followed Christian through the first floor until they came to the end of a long hallway.
Christian opened the door to reveal a large room filled with several computer monitors, a standing desk, and an eighty-five inch television mounted on the wall.
As soon as Christian entered the room, each monitor simultaneously blinked to life.
Christian shrugged and tucked a long strand of sandy blond hair behind his ear.
“You can take the kid out of Silicon Valley, but you can’t take Silicon Valley out of the kid.”
He raised his eyebrows and widened his eyes.
“Let’s take a look at that phone.”