Empty Promises

Sunday morning. She had lied to him about staying at Lisa’s; he already knew she wasn’t there. Jami left then and went to her parents’ house.
    Steve admitted he was strung out that morning. He’d snorted some more cocaine and then gone back to bed. Hardwick didn’t comment on the obvious: cocaine was hardly a sleep aid. Steve contradicted himself when he followed that by saying he had called the Hagels at eight, shortly after Jami left.
    His story was disjointed, and the Redmond detective noted that Steve’s time sequence changed often. Steve remembered that he called Lew’s house looking for more cocaine, but couldn’t find him. He had spoken with Lew’s wife. And then, he said, he called the Hagels again, and asked Jami to meet him at the Samena Club, a block away from her parents’, so they could talk. She finally agreed to meet him.
    Steve said he had seen an overnight bag behind her seat and her brown leather coat in the car. Still angry and suspicious, he’d taken her purse and run to his truck, locking it. Searching through her handbag for some clue to where she had been, he found the receipt from the Crest Motel from the night before. Steve said he didn’t put two and two together “until I found Lew’s business card. I still didn’t know about their affair.”
    Steve explained that the card itself wasn’t as damning as the fact that Lew had written his parents’ address and phone number on the back of it.
    Steve continued pawing through Jami’s purse, finding her credit cards, bills, makeup bag, and birth control pills. “I threw [the pills] away,” Steve said, smugly.
    Jami had driven off by then. Determined to find out everything he could, Steve said he stopped at a pay phone and called the Crest Motel. He had headed there and convinced the desk clerk that he had to search the room listed on the receipt. “I told them that my girlfriend had left her jewelry there.”
    He did not find the diamond ring he sought, but he said the room had been used, and he insisted he had seen cocaine residue on the headboard of the bed.
    Jami was at their house, Steve said, when he got home. At this point, his attitude changed markedly. He said that he was no longer jealous or furious with Jami. “We agreed to go our separate ways—until we both straightened out,” Steve said quietly.
    According to Steve, Jami went to his truck, gathered up her belongings and put them back in her purse. She stayed in their house only long enough to make a few phone calls, and then she walked out the door. He let her go without any objections. It was, he said, a quiet ending. “She didn’t say good-bye,” he said mournfully.
    Steve reiterated the many errands he had to do for his mother. He had their mortgage check and some packages to mail. So he hadn’t called Judy Hagel until about suppertime to see if Jami was back. He recalled that he had also talked to a friend, Jeff Caston, earlier in the day and might have called his sister Saundra. Then he had spent the night at the Hagels’.
    “I got real concerned when Jami didn’t show up for work on Monday morning,” Steve said. “She didn’t say good-bye, but she didn’t leave pissed off.”
    While Judy Hagel was frantic about Jami’s disappearance and had mobilized a huge group of friends who were working day and night to look for her, Steve’s mother was not as concerned, but as soon as she heard from Steve, she cut short her vacation and flew home from Cancún four days after Jami vanished. On October 8, Sherri and her daughter Saundra cleaned the Sherers’ messy house, after obtaining police permission. “I guess I’m kind of a neat freak,” Sherri explained. “I assumed Jami would be back, and I wanted it to be nice.” She explained that she didn’t want Jami to come home to a dirty house. The place was very clean when she finished. She had the carpets shampooed, and the house looked great.
    For Steve’s family, his involvement in a police investigation was almost business as usual. This time, the circumstances were more ominous than a disappearing—and reappearing—diamond ring or broken windows in a mobile home, but most of Steve’s relatives felt that Jami would soon come home. Steve didn’t have a lawyer, and no one blamed Sherri Schielke for being reluctant to hire still another attorney for her son. He had been putting her through the mill ever since he entered puberty, running up so many bills with lawyers, rehabs, fines, crashed