Empty Promises

the beneficiary on July 21, 1988. Her son, Chris, would now collect her insurance. Whether Steve knew about the change in her beneficiary is questionable.
    But Microsoft was an excellent company to work for, and there were other benefits that would probably go to Steve if Jami was dead, including the company stock she still owned, which was exploding exponentially.
    On October 5, King County sheriff’s deputy Roger Bleiler, who was Steven Sherer’s maternal uncle, found Jami Sherer’s car. It was parked in a grassy area near the parking lot of the Unitarian church at 14724 First Avenue N.E., just to the north of the Seattle city limits. Several Redmond investigators joined King County detectives at the site. The address was in Bleiler’s patrol sector, and he remarked that Steve had called him and asked him to be on the lookout for Jami’s car in his patrol area. Coincidentally, the Mazda was found in his uncle’s sector.
    Actually, the caller who spotted the car first was someone from the church office. The Mazda had been there so long that they thought it might have been abandoned or stolen. Jami Sherer always kept her car clean and polished. It still was, but now it had water spots on it. That was easy to explain. A wild windstorm had hit Seattle in midweek. There were downed branches lying around the car, but the area beneath the car was clear and dry. The driver’s door was unlocked, and they could see a black leather coat on the passenger seat and a duffel bag on the floor behind the driver’s seat.
    The hatchback portion of the Mazda was empty; if Jami had been in the car when it was driven to this spot, she was not here now. There was no other place in the small car to hide a body. East of the car was a large tract of undeveloped land, with trees, blackberry bushes, and weeds.
    Before any human touched the car, the investigators put in a call for help from the Search and Rescue bloodhounds. Since there was clearly no one in the car now, they needed to know who might have driven it last, but no one except that person could tell them that. They needed a creature with a sense of smell beyond human capability to identify the last driver.
    Richard Schurman III, responded with his dog, Maggie. According to Schurman, Maggie was the most dependable of all the search dogs he had worked with, and that was saying a lot. He’d been working with the bloodhounds since 1984. Although Schurman was a technologist in the aerospace industry, his avocation was Search and Rescue, and his heart was with his dogs. Maggie—formally known as Slo-Motion Magnolia Bark—had been on over two hundred missions, looking for lost children, runaways, disoriented Alzheimer’s patients, and others who were so lost that humans couldn’t find them.
    “We teach [the dogs] obedience first,” Schurman explained, “and then scent. They smell the scent article of the quarry [something that smells of the person pretending to be lost] and that person stands in plain sight and calls them. From there, the quarry only half-shows himself. And then a magical thing happens—the bloodhound drops his head to the ground and goes by scent alone.”
    Maggie and Schurman had worked together for twelve years, and though he had other dogs, he described her as “incomparable.”
    Schurman volunteered with Northwest law enforcement agencies, the FBI, the Washington State Patrol, and all the county and municipal agencies. He explained that a dog like Maggie, given enough time, could locate a single person in a crowd of many thousands at the Kingdome or Safeco Field, and she certainly could follow the trail of one person.
    When Schurman arrived with Maggie, he found that the police had no scent article available. They had no way of knowing who the items in the Mazda belonged to. The next best thing—and maybe the best thing—in this instance was to have Maggie sniff the area around the headrest of the driver’s seat. The upper back of a car seat and the headrest itself are areas where a driver’s hair and the bare skin at the back of the neck touch most often. Scales of dried skin, hair follicles, and perspiration are all deposited there in infinitesimal amounts.
    Maggie clambered into the car and sniffed avidly at the back and top of the Mazda’s driver’s seat. And then Schurman ordered, “Find!”
    Maggie went from the car to an area behind the church and then to a thickly vegetated field. She continued on to fenced-in sections around the