Empty Promises

on an impossible case, if indeed it was a case at all.
    A missing person? A runaway wife? A murder?
    If Jami had been murdered, the police had two excellent suspects. However, they had no body, no crime scene, no witnesses, and no physical evidence, and the circumstantial evidence was confusing. They had some bizarre stories from self-styled clairvoyants and a few reports from people in bars and minimarts who thought they had seen Jami.
    If Jami Sue Hagel Sherer was dead, no one knew or no one was telling where she waited for someone to find her.
    The most baffling case in a decade had just begun. For Jami’s mother and father, her little boy, her brothers, and the friends and co-workers who loved her, this was a terrible ordeal of hope and disappointment, anxiety, fear, and nightmares.
    Somehow, Jami had stepped through a gap in the here and now and disappeared completely.

    It was a stormy autumn, and the winter rains of the Northwest moved in to take the last of the golden leaves off the deciduous trees. Hunters fanned out in Washington State, hiking off-trail and through woods. Every year, men looking for deer and elk stumbled across a body or two, and 1990 was no different. But none of the weathered skulls turned out to be Jami Sherer’s.
    She hadn’t used her credit cards or her checkbook, nor had she applied for new cards. She made no phone calls to her home. Weeks became months, and it was a new year.
    For a time in January 1991, Redmond police officers and detectives put a round-the-clock surveillance on Steve Sherer, following him as he went to work, to card rooms, to bowling alleys, and home again.
    Steve continued to attract police attention long after they stopped tailing him.
    In June 1991 he got into a fight outside a bar in Bellevue with a man who pulled out a pistol and shot him in the forearm. He wasn’t badly hurt. In 1992 he spent a short time in jail for violating his probation by using cocaine and failing to meet with his probation officer.
    If Steve knew where Jami rested, he didn’t visit her.
    Her family had somehow gotten through the first Christmas without her. They could never have imagined how many more there would be before they would know what happened to her.

10
    I t would be virtually impossible to list all of the investigators and prosecutors who spent thousands of hours looking for Jami Sherer. She was precious to her family, but her life and her fate would soon become, in a different way, as valuable to the professionals who took over her case. Jami had once been the four-year-old who helped her mother raise her twin baby brothers, the bubbly little girl who was an indispensable member of the Hagel family, the popular teenager who seemed to have a wonderful future, and the responsible employee at Microsoft who was on her way up—but she had now become the photo image smiling from thousands of flyers in windows and tacked on telephone poles. She was a young wife and mother who had completely disappeared, and though her face was now familiar to thousands, her fate remained completely mysterious. The task of finding Jami Sherer was an awesome challenge. Several of the investigators who worked on her case in 1990 and 1991 finally announced that it was impossible to find Jami—that the case was, in the words of one detective, a “loser” that would never be solved. The years passed, and Jami’s case file was pushed to the back as new cases demanded attention.
    Unless someone offered new information or confessed to harming Jami Sherer, the search for her was over. A new team of detectives would have to pick up the gauntlet flung down by those who termed the case hopeless. A relatively small police department like Redmond’s might not have the resources to find a team like that.
    Judy and Jerry Hagel, however, refused to give up. They tried another route: They hired a private investigator who came highly recommended. “He told me it was a cut-and-dried case,” Judy recalled. “He promised that he would find Jami within six months. He said, ‘No problem.’ ”
    The P.I. traced Steve Sherer’s battered Blazer to the Deep South, where he arranged to have a private lab test the rig for blood. There were positive reactions, which meant only that someone had shed blood in Steve’s Blazer. After so long, it was impossible to determine whose blood it was or even whether it was animal or human blood. The sample wasn’t large enough, and it had been years since Jami