Empty Promises

that.
    Patrol Officer Brian Steinbus took the first missing persons report on Jami Sherer. After Steve and Judy had filled out forms at the police station, an officer accompanied them to the Sherers’ house on Education Hill in Redmond. The policeman walked through the house, opening up doors and poking his head in to check each room. Everything seemed normal, but Judy noted a large suitcase sitting on the bed in the master bedroom. Jami had been packing to leave Steve; why hadn’t she taken the suitcase with her?
    “Then we went into the kitchen,” Judy recalled, “and right by the fridge, there was a little [dried] red spot on the floor. The policeman was standing there and could see, so I reached down and picked it up, and I said, ‘What is this?’ … And Steve took a towel and grabbed it and said, ‘Oh, that’s just juice of Chris’s,’ and threw it in the garbage.”
    The police explained that they couldn’t mount a full-scale search for Jami until there was more evidence that she was the victim of foul play. She was an adult, and their experience told them that the vast majority of husbands and wives who disappear during an argument come home of their own accord. If they mobilized to look for every missing adult, they could do nothing else.
    Jami Sherer had said she was leaving Steve; her car—the 1980 Mazda RX7 she was so proud of—was missing; and she knew that Chris was safe with her mother. In the investigators’ minds, there was every reason to believe she was probably giving herself an opportunity to think things out—or perhaps she was with another man.
    Judy Hagel knew better, and so did Jami’s friends and her co-workers at Microsoft. Jami would never worry her family this way, and most of all, she would never have left Chris for a whole day without explaining to him why Mommy was going away and promising to be back very soon.
    Friends began to gather at the Hagels’ house. They mapped out the area around Jami and Steve’s house on Education Hill, Sherri Schielke’s house, the Bear Creek Taco Time, and Judy and Jerry’s house. Then they broke up into search groups. Microsoft management immediately agreed to print up thousands of flyers with pictures of Jami on them. They also gave many employees paid leave to join the search.
    Steve Sherer seemed reluctant to stay in his own home. He spent a lot of time at the Hagels’ house, even though they suggested that he stay at his own house in case Jami called. The search for Jami was in high gear, but Steve didn’t join in, nor did he pick up any flyers from the stack on the hall table. If he was looking for her at all, he kept it to himself. He seemed upset; he slept uneasily and said he couldn’t understand why this had happened to him .
    “Steve felt very sorry for himself,” one of Jami’s friends recalled. “It was ‘Poor me, poor me,’ instead of ‘Poor Jami.’ ”
    Steve was behaving oddly, to say the least. When he walked into Judy’s kitchen, she and Sheila, her son’s girlfriend, saw that he had some kind of lacy material twisted around one of his biceps, like a sleeve garter.
    “What’s that?” Rich Hagel asked.
    “Jami’s panties,” Steve answered. “I’m wearing them because it makes me feel closer to her.”
    The Hagels stared at each other in shock. That was crazy.
    Steve wore the panty-garter into a bar he often frequented, and told patrons there the same thing. He also started wearing a necklace he’d given Jami for Valentine’s Day; it was a diamond heart, definitely a woman’s necklace. Steve explained that wearing her things kept him connected to Jami.
    How odd that he never joined one of the search parties that had fanned out all around Redmond and Bellevue as scores of volunteers searched for Jami or her car. There were so many places to look; someone as tiny as Jami could be in the woods, in Lake Sammamish, or even in Lake Washington and no one would ever know. No one understood why Steve wasn’t helping them look for her. If she was in trouble, the more people out there the better. If she was dead, at least her family would know the truth. As it was, they were in agony.
    Judy Hagel tried not to think that Jami could be dead. She questioned Steve again and again, trying to get him to remember what had happened after Jami vanished on Sunday at noon. He shook his head, saying that he’d been gone when she left, on his way to check his mother’s home in Mill Creek and repeated that he’d