Empty Promises

Redmond detectives didn’t want to make the mistake that the Boulder Police Department had when they refused assistance from other agencies as they investigated the JonBenét Ramsey murder. Boulder hadn’t investigated a homicide for two decades before the Ramsey case, and by the time they acknowledged that they needed expert advice, their crime scene was contaminated, and it was too late.
    Of course, there was no crime scene in the Sherer case. No one knew where—or if—Jami had died. But everyone was heartened when Mains and Faddis uncovered one detail that had been overlooked by the original investigators. Steve Sherer had replaced some carpeting in the lower level of his house—in an area where the rug was almost brand new. There was no rational reason for him to have patched the carpet there. They set out to find the workman who had installed it.
    It was a start. And if they had one new direction to go, they knew there would be others.
    Legally, Jami was dead. But how could they prove that to a jury? It wasn’t going to be as simple as saying she met the legal time limit for a missing person to be construed as deceased.
    A forensic anthropologist told them that their chances of finding any identifiable part of Jami Sherer’s body were slim to none. In Washington State, where the rocky clay soil challenges gardeners who attempt to dig down more than 12 to 18 inches, all graves are shallow graves. Unless the weather is freezing cold, the detectives learned that a body buried a foot or slightly more beneath the surface or left on the surface in some isolated wilderness could completely disintegrate within twenty-eight days! When the soft tissue is gone, little animals carry away small bones and large animals take the femurs and humeri and skull.
    The trail was seven years cold, but to these detectives, that didn’t matter. They would make up the seven years. Among them, Jim Taylor, Greg Mains, and Mike Faddis had nearly seventy years of experience in law enforcement, with Faddis, the “rookie,” having only a decade on the Redmond Police Force. Taylor had thirty-one years in police work, and Mains twenty-seven. “All of us had tremendous curiosity,” Taylor said. “And my detectives were totally focused; Greg Mains was like a bulldog who got his teeth into something, and he was never going to let go.”
    One of the best things they had going for them was the fact that Mike Faddis was currently assigned to the Puget Sound Violent Crimes Task Force. This was an innovative way to let Seattle area law enforcement agencies pool their resources—and their officers—to wage war on crime. It allowed the agencies instant access to each other’s personnel and special knowledge. There were six FBI special agents, four Seattle Police detectives, two King County sheriff’s detectives, and representatives from the Secret Service; Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms; the Drug Enforcement Administration; and a number of small-town police departments in the area.
    Mike Faddis had been tapped to represent Redmond on the Violent Crimes Task Force. The task force goals were to cut down on the bank robberies that put Seattle at the top of the list in America for such crimes and to bring closure to a number of unsolved homicides in the Puget Sound area—including the case of Jami Sherer. Having Faddis in the task force opened up information opportunities that the Redmond Police Department had never before had. The computer age had opened up a whole new world of information, and Mike Faddis was now able to utilize it in the search for Jami.
    Jim Taylor’s network of police contacts was prodigious, and it was almost uncanny the way he could pick up a phone and find an old friend willing to assist in tracking Steve Sherer. When he needed a surveillance on Steve in Scottsdale, Arizona, Taylor called Norm Beasley, who was a colonel in the Arizona State Police and a fellow member of the board of the International Association of Chiefs of Police. Beasley told Taylor, “Just tell me what you need.”
    Beasley had Steve under watchful eyes by the next morning, in a sporadic surveillance operation that continued for fourteen months. Whenever Steve moved, Greg Mains was blocking his path, although Steve didn’t always know that. When Mains found an important witness in Southern Pines, North Carolina, Taylor realized that yet another member of the IACP board was the chief of police in Southern Pines: Gerald Galloway. “He told me