Empty Promises

questioning him. “After I left Jami at her car,” he said, “I went to my parents’ house, and my mom let me in. I went to bed until about eleven, and then I went to Al’s Car Quest and bought some glass tint…. I washed and waxed my car.”
    His mother had been selling something in a booth at a church bazaar at Saint Thomas’s in Lynnwood, and Lew said he dropped in there sometime in midday. After that, he went back to his parents’ place and tried to tint the windows of his pink Volkswagen. His estranged wife came by about three so they could show a prospective buyer a car they were trying to sell.
    “I didn’t see Jami at all on Sunday,” Lew Adams insisted. He readily agreed to give saliva and hair samples and to take a polygraph, if needed.
    Dru Adams, Lew’s wife, verified that he no longer lived with her and their children. Asked about any phone calls she received on Sunday, September 30, she remembered that Steve had called early, looking for Lew. That wasn’t unusual; Steve called often and repeatedly, “every half hour,” until he found Lew.
    Dru said she was aware that Lew and Steve were using drugs, but she didn’t question Lew. She just wanted to live her own life. She had seen Steve Sherer in person only two or three times, and she had never seen either man doing drugs in her home.
    It was something of a surprise for her when Jami Sherer called about ten or ten-thirty, asking for either Lew or Steve. Dru had met Jami only once—six months earlier, in a restaurant. “I told her neither of them were here and that Lew didn’t live here anymore.”
    Jami had probably been trying to find Lew to warn him that Steve knew she’d been with him the night before, but she could not very well have left that message with Dru Adams.
    While hardly the ideal husband and father, Lew Adams had been willing to talk to the Redmond investigators whenever they asked, and the only questions that made him sweat were about drugs. He got tears in his eyes at questions about Jami, but the tears seemed real, as if he was grieving for her.
    Steve Sherer was not at all anxious to talk in depth with the police. He told them he had no idea where Jami was. The last time he saw her, he said, she was packing a bag to leave him. It had been a quiet end to their sometimes explosive marriage, and he was coming down from a night of cocaine use and exhausted. But he had gone about keeping his promise to check his mother’s house while she was in Cancún. He fell asleep on the Schielkes’ couch and awakened an hour or two later to call the Hagels to talk to Jami.
    There was a cockiness about Steve Sherer, strange in a man whose wife had stepped through some hidden door and completely vanished. Steve continued to wear Jami’s panties around his biceps, drawing either sympathy or incredulous stares from those who frequented the same bars and card rooms he did.

9
    S teve Sherer’s reaction to Jami’s infidelity was ambivalence. Initially, he had been a man on fire with jealousy, but once she disappeared, he seemed more like a bystander than the one person who should be most concerned.
    Although he did not sign a formal statement, Steve did agree to talk with Steve Hardwick, a Redmond police detective whom he knew slightly. To Hardwick, Steve gave his recollection of that bizarre last weekend in September. Lew Adams had been willing, actually eager, to talk about Jami’s disappearance—even with a polygrapher—but nervous about any discussion of his drug use. Steve Sherer was the opposite; he was voluble when he spoke of his cocaine addiction, but he didn’t see much point in talking about Jami, and was definitely leery about taking a polygraph.
    Steve told Hardwick he’d been with Jami’s brothers late on Saturday night, September 29. The beginning of his evening had been spent in a search for cocaine. After he scored, he said, he drove back to the eastside and attended a party near the Hagels’ house. When he returned to his home in Redmond in the wee hours of Sunday morning, Jami wasn’t there. Steve said that he and her brother Rich had looked for her.
    At that point, Steve said he was very worried about Jami and called everyone he could think of in his attempt to find her. He admitted he was jealous, too. He called Lisa Cryder, the friend Jami was supposed to be with. Lisa said that Jami should have been home by then.
    Steve told Detective Steve Hardwick that Jami finally came home around seven-thirty on