Empty Promises

vanished.
    For all anyone knew, Jami Hagel might never have bled at all. She was so delicate that it wouldn’t have taken much to strangle her or break her neck.
    “That first P.I. took our money,” Judy said, “but he didn’t find Jami—didn’t come close. He found out it wasn’t as cut-and-dried as he thought.”
    Stung once but desperate to have some closure to their pain, the Hagels hired another private investigator. Allegedly, this man was a retired FBI agent. That seemed to them to qualify him as a superior investigator. “We paid him, too,” Judy recalled, “and nothing happened. I told him that I felt sure there were friends and family connected to Steve who knew more than they were admitting and asked him to interview them. That day, I’d even taken a thousand dollars in cash with me to pay him because he said what I wanted would cost more than we’d already given him. But that wasn’t enough either. The next day, I went back and gave him two thousand dollars. I waited a few days before I called to see if he’d learned anything. His phone was disconnected! He took our money and left us hanging.”
    Judy and Jerry Hagel never accepted that whoever had killed Jami—and they finally had to believe that she was dead—would escape punishment. The Hagels were awarded custody of Chris and raised him as they had raised their own four children. But Judy and her family had lost a good deal of faith in the system.
    Judy Hagel, attractive, slender, and blond, was worn down from years of waiting and dashed hopes, and she was quietly angry that her daughter could disappear and apparently no one cared enough to try to find her.
    By February 1997, Judy was out of patience. How could the world simply go on without Jami—or at least some acknowledgment that her daughter was important enough to merit a continuous investigation until her killer was arrested?
    Three months later, Dr. Donald Reay, the King County Medical Examiner, officially declared Jami Hagel Sherer dead. He wasn’t uncaring—not at all—but it had been almost seven years, and there were no indications at all that Jami still lived.
    Judy Hagel marched down to the Redmond Police Department with fire in her eyes. “I’ve had it! Why doesn’t someone try to find my daughter?” she demanded.
    *  *  *
    The City of Redmond had grown tremendously between 1990 and 2000, and there was a new city hall and police station. Most of the original detectives who had searched for Jami Sherer had retired or moved on to other departments or other professions. Sergeant Butch Watson had become a massage therapist. Detective Steve Hardwick was an investigator for an insurance company. They had given the investigation into Jami’s disappearance their best efforts and anything more seemed futile.
    In January 1997, Lieutenant James Taylor was appointed to head the major crimes unit of the Redmond Police Department. J.W.B. Taylor isn’t easy to describe. More Irish than the Kennedy family, Taylor’s unit is almost booby-trapped with Irish paraphernalia that would intimidate the stoutest Scandinavian—of which there are many in Seattle. Taylor marches with the Greater Seattle Pipe Band in kilt and full regalia, equally adept at bagpipes and drums. In August 2000 the Seattle group joined 10,000 other pipers and drummers in the Millennium March Past the Castle in Edinburgh, Scotland, to raise funds for the Marie Curie Cancer Nursing Service. Taylor’s mother and father had marched the same royal mile fifty-eight years earlier with the Canadian and British forces, and his grandfather had marched one hundred years ago with the Gordon Highlanders.
    In addition to being a police lieutenant, Taylor is a special agent with the Coast Guard Investigative Services, a board member of the American Association of Chiefs of Police, and a member of a task force that specializes in investigating Asian gang crime. As an investigator, he is also as stubborn as they come. He listened to Judy Hagel’s harangue with interest—and sympathy. Like everyone else in his department he knew of the disappearance of Jami Sherer, although he had been head of a traffic unit at the time she vanished. Now he pulled out the file on Jami Sherer and committed it to memory. The fact that it had been deemed an impossible case was probably what challenged him the most.
    “I went down to where Judy Hagel worked,” Taylor said, remembering his first visit to the car dealership where Judy