Empty Promises

fallen asleep there. “No way,” Judy said flatly. “No way you were sleeping, Steve. You would have been on the phone every fifteen minutes if Jami was gone. You always are.”
    She kept counting the hours between Steve’s phone calls that Sunday. It had been five or six hours! He called after Jami said she was on her way to Taco Time—he called twice, fifteen minutes apart, as he always did. And then he didn’t call again until six-thirty. That behavior was so unlike him that Judy felt cold dread. She had to be careful about questioning him; if he became annoyed, he would take Chris and leave—and she couldn’t let Chris go with him. So she tried to space out her questions.
    During the first or second day he stayed with the Hagels—Monday or Tuesday—Judy heard Steve making a phone call, evidently to an auto detailer. She knew cars and all the lingo because she worked at a dealership in Bellevue.
    “I heard him call,” she said. “He wanted a detail on his vehicle.” Steve wanted all the trash inside cleaned up, and the interior vacuumed and shampooed, with a wash and wax on the outside. He’d never bothered to have his cars cleaned before; Steve’s vehicles were always a mess. Why now? What did it matter if his Blazer was clean when his wife was lost somewhere?
    Judy walked into the room where the phone was. “Steve,” she said carefully, “why do you want a detail on your car?”
    “Oh, well,” he stuttered. “Ah, ahh, Rich spilled beer in it. I’m not supposed to be drinking beer, so I want to get it detailed so the smell won’t bother me—tempt me, I guess.”
    Judy had ridden in Steve’s Blazer the day before. There was no smell of beer in it. Nevertheless he was adamant that he was going to have it detailed. She wasn’t sure if he ever accomplished that, but as he drove the Blazer, more and more mud and weeds dropped off. The Redmond investigators had not searched the Blazer, nor had they put it up on a hoist to look at the undercarriage. One of the best methods criminalists use to determine where a vehicle has been is to test the mud, dirt, and vegetation caught beneath it. It was too late for that now.

    By October 4, 1990, there had been no word at all from Jami Hagel. Her smiling face beamed from telephone poles, store windows, and bulletin boards all over the eastside. Microsoft printed up a second flyer with a picture of Jami’s car and a description of the charcoal-gray RX7 with a sunroof, and Washington plates: 541-AHX. The last time her parents had seen Jami, she had been wearing blue jeans, a white T-shirt, and new white tennis shoes.
    The Redmond police no longer believed that she had run away or taken a vacation from her life. They worked now to learn as much about her world as possible. It didn’t take long for them to find out that Steven Sherer had a long rap sheet, mostly for traffic offenses and harassment, and that he was on record for having an incredibly violent temper. But then, Lew Adams, the man Jami had seen the night before she vanished, wasn’t exactly an upstanding citizen either. Both Sherer and Adams were known cocaine users. The obvious conclusion was that one of them knew what had become of Jami, but there was always the slight chance that she had been abducted by a stranger who spotted the beautiful young mother somewhere between her home and her parents’ home early Sunday afternoon.
    Jami would have made a perfect victim. She was distraught and frightened about what would happen now that she was finally leaving Steve, and she told her mother during their last phone call that she was hurrying to get out of her house before Steve came home. She would have been a prime target for someone who wanted to grab her—too distracted and too tiny to put up much of a fight. The chances of a stranger abduction were slim, but it had to be considered.
    If the investigators couldn’t find Jami, they needed to find her car, which might contain evidence or, in the worst-case scenario, Jami’s body. Meanwhile they set out to learn what motivation someone might have had to kill her.
    On October 2, Sergeant L. M. “Butch” Watson got a page from Lew Adams shortly after 8:00 P.M. When he talked to Adams, Watson noted that the man was extremely emotional, and concerned that Steve Sherer had harmed Jami. Asked why he felt that way, Lew Adams said that Steve had “many things over Jami” and that Steve was a recovering alcoholic with a gambling addiction. Steve