Page 31 of Guess Again
“Go to Menomonee Valley in Milwaukee, to the old, abandoned stockyards. Find a decrepit looking warehouse. Number nine, Ethan. Are you paying attention? Warehouse number nine in Menomonee Valley. High up on one of the walls is an envelope with something for you. Go, Ethan. Find what’s there. Do your thing, Mr. One Hundred Percent. And then, come back and we’ll talk some more.”
Francis smiled, hung up the phone, and left the visitation booth.
CHAPTER 28
Milwaukee, Wisconsin Wednesday, July 23, 2025
AS SOON ASETHAN EXITED THE PRISON HE JOGGED ACROSS THEparking lot to his Jeep Wrangler. He shuffled through the console until he found a pen and paper, onto which he scribbledWarehouse 9, Menomonee Valley.He headed east toward Milwaukee. For two and a half hours Francis Bernard’s voice rang in his ears.
Not all those who wander are lost, but all those who are lost certainly wander.
He blinked his eyes and tried to quiet Francis’s voice, but still it echoed through his head.
So I’m going to help you out, Ethan. I’m going to help you stop wandering in the darkness. I’ll give you a bit of direction. Do you want direction in your life, Ethan?
How, Ethan wondered, could Francis Bernard knowanythingabout Callie Jones? The man had been in prison for years before Callie disappeared in 2015. Ethan considered that Francis could be sending him on a wild goose chase meant to show Ethan that he had some control over him, even from the confines of a maximum-security prison.
There’s an envelope there, Ethan. Do your thing, Mr. One Hundred Percent.
Ethan made it to the outskirts of Milwaukee, and then found his way into the city. Menomonee Valley was located in the heart of Milwaukee and consisted of old stockyards that used to house cattle for the meatpacking district. Long abandoned, they had fallen into disrepair over the course of decades. The valley, now mostly renovated, still had tough spots that were no-go zones for most folks.
The sun was setting, and long shadows crept across the roads. Ethan crossed a set of freight tracks and turned right onto a dilapidated road riddled with potholes. Fog seeped from manhole covers before disappearing into the heat of the evening. When he came to the warehouses, he slowed. Each building consisted of a large bay door that retracted upwards. Next to each bay was a door painted with a number. Most of the numbers were faded and illegible, but Ethan could clearly make out the number 3 on one of the doors. He drove past several warehouses until he came to number 9.
Off in the distance he saw the lights of American Family Field. The Brewers were at home and fending off both the heat and the Pittsburgh Pirates. The livelihood of the ballpark felt like a galaxy away from the eerie bank of abandoned warehouses Francis Bernard had sent him to. He pulled next to warehouse number 9 and looked around at the forsaken valley. Before exiting the Wrangler, he opened the glove box and retrieved his Beretta 92FS pistol. The DCI had not formally armed him, but Ethan was a legal gun owner and rarely ventured far from home unarmed. Old habits die hard.
He walked to the warehouse door and peeked through the glass. The building was as abandoned as the valley it stood in. He checked the Beretta to make sure a round was chambered, then twisted the door handle and pushed it open. It squeaked into the evening and a waft of heat came from the building. Even as the sun was setting, it was close to ninety-five degrees outside. With a long summer day of the sun beating down on the metal roof of the warehouse, Ethan guessed the temperature was closer to 120 degrees inside the building.
He raised his gun and walked through the doorway. A thin coat of perspiration covered his face, and the stench of rotting garbage assaulted his nostrils. The setting sun offered a soft brilliance through the dingy windows positioned at the top of each wall of the warehouse. He took a quick look around to make sure the place was empty, and then turned on the flashlight of his cell phone and walked the perimeter of the warehouse. Along the northeast corner he looked up and saw something in the shadows, a form protruding from the wall. He used the flashlight to get a better look. Ten feet up, a manila envelope had been secured by duct tape.
“Son of a bitch,” Ethan whispered, allowing his mind to contemplate only for a moment how Francis Bernard could have known about this envelope, or how long it had been there.
He looked around until he found an old crate that he pulled over. He stepped onto it and gained his balance before reaching up and grabbing the envelope, which he ripped free from the tape that held it. He shined his flashlight on the rest of the wall and, seeing nothing else, jumped down from the crate and hurried outside.
He was drenched in sweat from the sweltering warehouse. The ninety-five degree external temperature did little to cool him off. He climbed into the Wrangler and cranked the AC before he tore the envelope open. He turned the package upside down. There was a single item inside and it spilled onto the passenger seat.
It was a ’90s-style, prepaid Samsung cell phone.
CHAPTER 29
Cherryview, Wisconsin Thursday, July 24, 2025
ETHAN SAT AT THE DESK IN THE SMALL OFFICE OF HIS HOME. THEsurface was cluttered with the Callie Jones case. Since his visit to warehouse #9 in Menomonee Valley, Ethan had zeroed in on Callie’s cell phone records from the original investigation, which consisted of pages and pages of calls the girl had made the summer she disappeared.
Callie’s phone had been recovered from North Point Pier on Lake Okoboji, where her boat had been found secured to the dock. Callie had taken her parents’ boat out to The Crest to attend a party the night she disappeared. No one had seen her after she left the island. The boat had been discovered Sunday morning at North Point Pier, along with Callie’s phone and the girl’s blood at the end of the dock.
Pete Kramer and his team had dug deeply through Callie’s phone, doing the grunt work years before and painstakingly identifying nearly every incoming and outgoing call and text message. There was only one number from that summer that had gone unidentified and could not be registered to a user. That number had been linked back to a prepaid, disposable phone that had never been found.
Pete Kramer and his team had gone to the effort of tracking down the serial number of that phone, and then found the bar-code to determine the make and model—a Samsung disposable phone that had been purchased at a gas station in Cherryview. Pete had used the Wisconsin Department of Justice databank and DCI forensic techs to determine the date the phone had been purchased, and then pulled security footage from the gas station on the day of the purchase. The grainy video showed Callie Jones walking to the register and paying cash for the phone. What Callie had done with the phone, and who she had given it to, was a glaring hole in Pete Kramer’s original investigation. But now, ten years later, Ethan sat in his home staring at the Samsung phone Callie had purchased, confirmed by the serial number. And Francis Bernard had led him to it.
As Ethan thumbed through the pages chronicling the calls made from Callie’s phone, he saw that nearly every one had pinged a tower in Cherryview. On a hunch, he decided to log every call or text Callie had made that pinged a tower outside a twenty-mile radius of Cherryview, Wisconsin. During the year that started January 1, 2015, and ended July 18, 2015—the last day anyone saw Callie Jones—Ethan found thirty pings outside the Cherryview radius. He pulled a clean sheet of paper in front of him and listed the cities where the cell towers were located. All were in Wisconsin, with many located between Madison and Milwaukee. A cluster was in northern Minnesota, which was explained by a fishing trip Callie had taken with her sister and father in early July. Only one, Ethan noted as he reviewed the list, had originated in Chicago. It was made on Thursday, July 16, 2015 at 10:00 a.m. Two days before she disappeared. The number Callie had called was the prepaid Samsung.
Ethan dialed Pete Kramer’s number. He picked up on the first ring.
“Hey, I’m reviewing Callie Jones’s phone records, and I think I came across something. What can you tell me about the unidentified number that showed up in Callie’s caller log?”
“We looked pretty hard at the phone,” Pete said. “Our tech guys were able to identify that calls and texts were made between the two numbers—Callie’s and the burner phone.”
“I don’t see any transcripts of the text messages.”
