Empty Promises

elaborately deceptive plots they have concocted more than the sex and money that appear—at first—to be their motivation.
    “The Conjugal Visit” and “Killers on the Road” explore the mindless kind of murder that we all fear in our deepest hearts. Why would an absolute stranger set out to earn our trust—and at the same time be coldly willing to destroy us? These predators are out there, prowling our streets and highways, looking for a perverted and deadly thrill.
    “A Dangerous Mind” and “To Kill and Kill Again” explore the phenomenon of socially alienated youthful murderers whose motivation is more difficult to understand than any I have encountered. Teenage killers inspire shocking headlines as their number increases in our society. We have to wonder how someone so young can be so full of rage.
    “The Stockholm Syndrome” stands alone. This is the case on which I based my only novel, Possession. This Oregon case may be a lesson for anyone who has ever said that he or she could never be brainwashed. Think again; it is only a matter of how long it would take.

Empty Promises
    The disappearance of Jami Hagel Sherer has many chilling similarities to the vanishing of a half-dozen wives and mothers who were listed as missing in western Washington in the nineties, so many women gone with no explanation that it seemed epidemic in the Northwest.
    Jami was twenty-five when she disappeared. She would be thirty-five today—if she is still alive. Jami grew up only blocks from where I raised my four children in the sixties and seventies. Young families moved to the Seattle suburb of Bellevue as it burgeoned in the early fifties because it seemed the safest, best place to raise children. Then it was a world where crime and drugs and ugliness seemed far away.

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    I t was a Sunday afternoon, the last day of September 1990, when Judy Hagel began to feel uneasy. Usually she grew annoyed and exasperated when her son-in-law, Steve Sherer, phoned constantly to check on her daughter, Jami. He kept such close tabs on Jami that she seemed to move on an invisible tether. If she left home to visit her parents, he called to be sure she arrived within fifteen minutes, and then he kept calling to ask what she was doing, and very soon, of course, to insist that she come back home to their house in Redmond. If he had his way, Jami would never visit her family at all.
    But this afternoon, Steve didn’t call—not for five hours. It was a record for him, and Judy found herself jumpy not at the ringing of her phone but because of the silence. She had expected Jami all day, and Jami never showed up. Judy was baby-sitting with Jami’s little boy, Chris,* and it wasn’t like her daughter to stay away when she had promised Chris she would be back soon.

    Bellevue was once as far removed from Seattle in lifestyle and population as any of a number of small towns that dot the state of Washington. Fifty years ago it was a rustic hamlet on the other side of Lake Washington, where farms and blueberry bogs could be found just outside town. Before the first floating bridge connecting Mercer Island and Bellevue to the mainland in Seattle was completed in 1940, the little town was far off the beaten path. No one ever imagined Bellevue would become the third largest city in the state with its own mirror-windowed skyscrapers and upscale malls. After World War II, it became a bastion of affordable three-bedroom, bath-and-a-half houses that young marrieds could afford, and they flocked to the neighborhoods of Lake Hills and Eastgate. Returning veterans and recent college graduates found jobs at the Boeing Airplane Company. Young husbands went off to work and young wives stayed home and raised four children per family, long before anyone had heard about the population explosion. Appliances were avocado green, carpets were an orange shag that had to be raked as well as vacuumed, and tile floors were waxed faithfully once a week.
    It was a world of kaffeeklatsches, where wives shared recipes for frozen strawberry jam, onion soup dip, and complicated casseroles whose main ingredient seemed always to be Cheez Whiz. Yards sprouted gardens, and wives traded seedlings as frequently as they took turns baby-sitting. It was a time long before day care and two-income families. Bellevue seemed to promise that after the long dark war, everything was going to be all right. It was an ideal community in a halcyon era.
    But the decades that followed brought a