Empty Promises

manned the front desk. “I introduced myself and told her I’d been reviewing the case for a few months and that I thought it was solvable.”
    “She didn’t trust me,” he recalled. “She looked at me as if she had heard too many promises before and she didn’t believe anything. I told her I’d prove her wrong.”
    He didn’t say when he’d prove her wrong because he had no idea how long it was going to take. And he didn’t say how because he didn’t know yet exactly how he was going to do it, but Taylor knew he would do it. “Judy Hagel was angry and upset at the whole Redmond Police Department, and she vented some at me. I didn’t blame her. She said, ‘I supplied you people with information. I told you what happened, and you never did anything with it. I even walked through the house with you and pointed out clues, and the officer with me just overlooked them.’ ”
    Judy told Taylor that the first year Jami was gone, she cried out loud every night for her lost daughter. “After that, over the next years, when I went to bed, I cried in my heart.”
    She looked directly into Taylor’s eyes. “Do you know what happened to my daughter?”
    “Yes, I do,” Taylor answered.
    “What?”
    “Your daughter is dead.”
    “Yes,” Judy said quietly. “I know.”
    “But,” Taylor promised her, “I will do my very, very best to determine how it happened, who did it, and—if we can—hold them responsible.”
    In the hour that Judy spent telling Taylor of her frustrations, he heard several aspects of the case and bits of information that were new to him. Perhaps they were buried somewhere in the thick file on Jami Sherer and he had missed them. Perhaps not. “What you need to do,” he said to Judy, “is to sit down like you’re writing a college thesis and, once again, tell me everything , everything at all that you told the police department that you feel perhaps we overlooked.”
    A few weeks later, Jim Taylor received a package in the mail: a written record of Judy Hagel’s seven years of suspicion, frustration, and unending loss.
    Winning alliances are often composed of disparate components. Hundreds of people had looked for Jami and her killer. Now seven would join forces to avenge her:
    Three cops.
    Three prosecutors.
    And one bloodhound.

    Jim Taylor had two young detectives in mind, men he had known since the days when he had commanded them in the traffic division and on patrol: Greg Mains, age forty-seven, and Mike Faddis, thirty-two. Mains was deceptively quiet and looked nothing at all like a homicide detective. Neither did Mike Faddis, a tall, gregarious man with the shoulders of a fullback. Taylor asked them what they remembered about Jami Sherer, and Faddis said quietly, “I was there when they found her car. It’s been a long time.”
    Jim Taylor recruited Greg Mains and Mike Faddis for a three-year investigation that would take them all around America and even outside the country. If they couldn’t find Jami herself, he wanted them to bring him enough evidence to convict her killer.
    He asked them to begin with the file that existed on Jami Sherer. “Now,” he said, tapping it with his finger, “I don’t care if this is true or this is true. I want you to take me to the file and prove that what’s in it is fact—or it’s not true. I want you to read Judy Hagel’s summary and tell me if what she says is true or not. And that’s how we’re going to start.”
    Greg Mains and Mike Faddis went through the 1990-1991 file and began to flesh out information that had come in just after Jami Sherer vanished.
    “I wanted to be able to give Judy Hagel some hope by our next visit … to tell her we were aggressively pursuing it, but there would be no guarantees,” Taylor said. “Even if we were able to arrest someone, it wouldn’t be a given that they would be convicted.”
    For the first time in a very long time, Judy trusted the people investigating her daughter’s case. As Greg Mains and Mike Faddis began dropping by to check in with her every other day or so, Judy began to believe that somehow, some way, Jami would finally have justice.
    Taylor meant it when he said he wanted Faddis and Mains to pursue every avenue. “I don’t care how much money you spend,” he told them, “or how long you have to work on it. If I come to work on a Monday and hear you got a tip Friday night that was important to this case, and that tip was in Boston or Paris, you had better have