Empty Promises

been to Boston or Paris and back by the time I see you—or you’re fired.”
    The two detectives took him at his word and got tips from as far away as Bogotá, Colombia. They never got to Paris, but they did follow leads in California, Arizona, North Carolina, Hawaii, Wisconsin, British Columbia, Germany, and all over the Northwest.
    Taylor’s part-time assignment as a special agent with the Coast Guard requires him to do background checks on individuals. He has learned a dozen ways to work back through people’s lives and find out who they really are. He decided to send out Greg Mains and Mike Faddis—and whoever else he could pull off other cases, if only temporarily—to find out everything they could about the last man Jami was with: her husband, Steven Sherer.
    “We are going to do an autopsy on Steve Sherer’s life,” Taylor told them, “and we’re going to find out everything we can about every phase of his life, starting with the day he was born. I’ve found out you can see patterns early: if you find a reasonably good kid in junior high and high school, he’s probably going to be a good man. If you start to find negative behavior patterns and negative attitudes about truth and the law in high school, you often find an adult criminal later.”
    One of the other six members on the fresh team investigating Jami Hagel’s disappearance was King County Assistant Prosecuting Attorney Marilyn Brenneman. When she first encountered the Sherer case, Brenneman had already successfully prosecuted more than her share of criminally manipulative males. It was Brenneman who prosecuted Randy Roth, the serial wife killer I wrote about in A Rose for Her Grave. Another of her successful cases trapped a con man who made millions of dollars by stripping Washington beaches of one of their prime resources: the mammoth geoduck clams. Brenneman also closed down the Monastery, a nightclub that lured children and young teens into drugs, prostitution—and worse. When she was pregnant with her son Adam, her co-prosecutor was her husband Phil Brenneman. “It had to be the ‘Love Beds Scam’ case,” she said, laughing. That was the name the prosecutor’s office gave to a chain of phony water-bed stores set up to get around a statute that closed down prostitution masquerading as massage parlors. Instead of “masseuses” in the windows; the water-bed stores had scantily dressed women offering “demonstrations” of how the water beds worked.
    “There I sat,” Marilyn Brenneman recalled, “very visibly pregnant. To keep the jurors from giggling at a husband-wife prosecuting team in a case like that, Phil did the legwork while I did the courtroom work.”
    After prosecuting so many woman-killers and bunco artists, nobody would have blamed Brenneman for distrusting all men, but nothing could be further from the truth. She and Phil are happily married, and he now heads the Civil Enforcement Unit for the city of Seattle, while she’s mother to a blended brood of four sons—hers, his, and theirs. Although she came to the law in an era when the profession was far more fraternity than sorority, Marilyn Brenneman rolled up her sleeves and plunged into cases that involved stakeouts, death threats, and endless days working beside both female and male detectives. Still, even today she occasionally encounters the good-old-boy syndrome, where male attorneys pontificate that “little ladies” shouldn’t worry themselves about bloody homicide.
    Such comments roll off her back, and she just laughs when defense attorneys patronizingly call her Marilyn rather than Ms. Brenneman. She knows the jurors aren’t fooled by this ploy.
    She was raised on St. Simons Island off the coast of Georgia, but she went to school on the mainland in Brunswick. Her dad was an auto mechanic who repaired police cars. He built himself a Ford with the biggest engine around, and often tested its police intercept engine on the straight flat roads of the Georgia coast, sending up a plume of red clay dust as he revved up to 150 miles an hour.
    “I was a teenager bent on growing up fast,” Marilyn said. “When I was about sixteen, I took my dad’s car out and I was hitting over 150 miles an hour too. I was busted when the local cops told my dad they’d seen him out driving—and he knew he hadn’t been that day, that it must have been me. He traded in the car he loved for a 1965 powder-blue Mustang with a six-cylinder engine. It wouldn’t go very fast,