Empty Promises

church until she found a path that seemed to fascinate her. And then she got down to business.
    “You can read your dog,” Schurman said. “Maggie raised her tail straight up and put her nose down. She reached a trail between a brushy line along I-5. She seemed to be working a valid scent trail. She tracked the I-5 trail southbound to an off-ramp that led to a bus stop. And then she stopped. She was no longer interested.”
    It appeared that the driver of the Mazda had left the car in the church lot and made his (or her) way to a narrow path along the freeway until that person reached a transit bus stop. Presumably, they had boarded a bus. At that point, even the best tracking dog in the world would have lost the trail.
    The next morning, the detective team decided to do another dog search, this time with scent objects. Accompanied by an officer, Schurman went to the Sherer home at 10709 161st Avenue North in Redmond. Steve gave them permission to search—but only for Jami’s clothing, just enough to obtain a scent object that the Search and Rescue dogs could track. Schurman was able to find what he needed for his dogs.
    Schurman had long forceps and sterile bags to be sure that the items he selected would not be contaminated by the odor of anyone but household members. “Our DNA constantly sheds in the skin cells and bacteria,” he said later, explaining that stress scents were stronger. Anyone who is tense or afraid exudes more odor. Schurman gathered clothing in three bags. The first was from the floor of the master bedroom, and the next two from the closet and the laundry basket.
    The first scent item was Jami’s underwear from the bedroom floor. The search dogs circled the car and went nowhere. They couldn’t get interested in a scent because, clearly, Jami had never been there in that church parking lot in that car. She was not, apparently, the last person to drive her car.
    They had not had permission to take Steve Sherer’s clothes, but his clothes and Jami’s were mixed in the laundry basket. A pair of Steve’s trousers had been entangled with Jami’s clothes in the hamper. When those items of Jami’s were given to the bloodhounds, they picked up the male scent—Steve’s scent that had transferred there; the dogs had already shown a complete lack of interest in Jami’s scent. It was the second scent they picked up on. From 9:39 on the morning of October 6, until 10:13, a fresh team of bloodhounds followed the male scent—Steve’s scent—on exactly the same route to I-5 that Maggie had tracked the day before. They too stopped in bewilderment when they lost their trail at the bus stop.
    If those dogs could have talked—and they almost could have, in their own way—they would have told the detectives that Steve Sherer had left Jami’s Mazda RX7 in the church parking lot and then made his way to the bus stop where he either boarded a bus or was picked up by someone.

8
    A lthough Steve Sherer wasn’t participating in the search for Jami, he did conduct a search of his own shortly after 10:00 A.M . on Sunday morning, September 30. He knew from the receipt in Jami’s purse that she had been at the Crest Motel the night before. He went there and said he wanted to search the room she was in because she had lost her diamond ring. The clerk finally allowed him into the room Jami and Lew had used, but wrote down the time and his license number on the room ticket. No one knew whether he had really been looking for that same expensive ring or just snooping to find evidence that Jami had cheated on him.
    Sergeant Watson, along with Detectives L. C. Conrad, Steve Hardwick, and Oscar Guttormsen, processed Jami’s Mazda RX7 at 7:30 A.M. on October 6. They dusted it for latent prints on the outside and the interior door windows, and bagged the fur seat covers, floor mats, and front and rear carpeting for further examination. They located a set of keys to the Mazda in the pocket of the woman’s leather coat.
    The Mazda’s seat was pushed back to accommodate a driver at least five inches taller than Jami. Judy Hagel had told the investigators that Jami had such short legs that she could drive her car only if the seat was pushed all the way forward, and even then she had to have a pillow behind her back. Judy also told them that Jami was a fanatic about never leaving her car unless the alarm was turned on. Detectives found that the alarm was off.
    As they ran their hands along the console, they found