Empty Promises

what Steve had been looking for in the Crest Motel. There, in a small manila envelope that someone had stuffed under the driver’s side of the console, were Jami’s ring and her diamond-studded wristwatch. For her own reasons, perhaps, she had hidden them there. If Jami had run away of her own accord, why would she have left jewelry worth thousands of dollars behind? For that matter, why would she have left her car behind? She loved her car, and she had just put a new CD stereo system in it. Her mother had given her the sun-roof as a present.
    And who would she have run away with? She was a very open woman, who shared her intimate thoughts with several girlfriends and with her mother. She was involved with a man other than her husband, just on the verge of a full-blown affair, but that man wasn’t missing. The detectives knew right where Lew Adams was, and all of her friends swore she had never cheated on Steve before.
    No one who knew her could even imagine that Jami Sherer was devious enough to pretend she was excited about being with Lew just to hide a real affair with a man she planned to run away with.
    The bag behind the driver’s seat held clothes, all right, but it was an odd assortment for a woman to have packed as she prepared to leave her husband for good. Although it contained items like shampoo, curlers, and a hairbrush, the clothes made no sense. There were only sports clothes—sweatshirts and T-shirts. There were no clothes that Jami could wear to her job at Microsoft, no nightclothes, no diapers for Chris. There was no underwear at all; it looked as if someone had grabbed things mindlessly and stuffed them into the duffel bag.
    Had Jami been truly frightened that Steve would hurt her, she might have done that. But all reports indicated that she wasn’t afraid that last Sunday morning. She had even felt safe enough to take a shower in her own house. And she had evidently already packed when she called her mother to say she was on her way to Taco Time and then to the Hagels’. Moreover, Jami was too well organized to have packed such a jumble of things in such a haphazard manner. More likely, she had packed carefully, and someone, enraged, had grabbed the duffel bag and dumped her things out. Perhaps, Judy Hagel thought, the suitcase she had seen on the bed in the master bedroom had been Jami’s bag.
    Forensic testing of the items taken from Jami Sherer’s car revealed no blood or fingerprints that might have helped build a case against a suspect. It was unlikely that Jami, injured or dead, had been transported in the Mazda RX7. The car appeared to have been left there by someone who wanted to make it look as if she had driven away from her home and then deliberately abandoned the Mazda.
    Steve insisted there had been only one key to the Mazda, and that Jami had it. He identified the key found in her leather coat pocket as that key. Redmond detectives again asked permission to walk through Steve Sherer’s house. He agreed.
    “We did a general walk-through,” Butch Watson wrote in his follow-up report. “The upper level consisted of a living room, dining room, kitchen, bathroom, and three bedrooms. The lower level consisted of a family room, bathroom, washroom, and garage. A general inspection of the residence revealed no obvious signs of a struggle although it should be noted that the residence was very unkempt and disorderly, with clothing stacked everywhere … We checked some carpet stains with hemo-test tablets and found no obvious signs of blood.”
    Hemo-test tablets could detect the presence of blood and give criminalists reasons to test it further for origin and type, but that was all they could do. The tablets themselves could not differentiate between human blood, deer blood, and rabbit blood, for that matter. Steve’s explanation for the stain in his living room was that it was Kool-Aid, and it might very well have been. It was not blood.
    Lew Adams had told the detectives that Steve was interested in swinging, and indeed they did find magazines called Swing and Sway and Let Us Entertain You , which catered to couples and singles who wanted to mix and match with strangers. They located one smashed videotape and an intact tape, which they took for viewing to see if it had any bearing on Jami Sherer’s disappearance. The other tapes in the Sherers’ bedroom were all commercially made movies.
    The intact tape was clearly the one Lew Adams had described. It showed Lew and Jami,