Empty Promises

he had been to a breakfast with the woman [the witness] that morning,” Taylor marveled. “She had been in Jami’s wedding party, and all Jerry had to do was run down to the bank where she worked!”
    It was as if Mains and Faddis and Taylor were meant to solve this case. And of course the contacts Taylor had maintained for three decades were vitally important. If they needed surveillance of Steve Sherer’s travels outside Washington, they had it. If they needed to find women he had been in touch with since Jami disappeared, Jim Taylor could usually come up with an associate who could get the information within hours. He got help from Two Rivers, Wisconsin, and Palm Springs, California, and many spots in between. Of the ten people who attended IACP committee meetings with Taylor, three had access to exactly what the Redmond investigators needed.
    Greg Mains and Mike Faddis had no idea how many people they would eventually talk to: not dozens but hundreds. Starting with the original case file, school yearbooks, old neighborhoods, Microsoft co-workers, friends, friends of friends, old tips, and new tips, Taylor wanted them to follow up every single lead with the full expectation that they would find more. “Even if you get nothing from a contact but the name of another person to talk to,” he told them, “you’ve got another place to go, and another and another … or at the very least, you know you’ve checked that lead and proved that it ended nowhere.”
    In the end, Greg Mains and Mike Faddis would talk to more than three hundred people in their search for Jami Sherer.
    The Redmond investigators knew they had to find enough information to convince Marilyn Brenneman that she had a case solid enough to take before an inquiry judge—the Washington State counterpart of a grand jury. Just as in a grand jury session, witnesses would be called, many of whom had devoutly hoped that the search for Jami was over and that suspicion was no longer focused on Steve.
    But that wasn’t going to happen.
    Finding Jami Sherer’s killer began as Greg Mains and Mike Faddis’s occupation, but it would become their avocation, and then their obsession. Steve Sherer was in the crosshairs of their microscope of Jami’s life, but they were also looking for Lew Adams. He had moved away from Seattle. They eventually found him in Idaho, and as before, his involvement with drugs made him anxious. He still felt guilt over Jami, but he was willing to testify against Steve Sherer if it came to that.
    What Mike Faddis and Greg Mains eventually uncovered was amazing. Much of it came about because of hard work and some of it by luck.
    But perhaps some of it came through angels.

11
    I n order to establish that Jami had not simply run away and begun a new life somewhere, the Redmond detectives contacted every state to see if, after September 30, 1990, Jami Sherer or Jami Hagel had applied for a driver’s license or for unemployment benefits or welfare. She had not. She hadn’t filed an income tax return, used her credit cards, or tried to get new credit cards. She had not attempted to get a passport. She had never touched her bank accounts. In the past seven years, no one had ever done a credit check on her. She had never been arrested. There were no death certificates in her name in any state.
    All human beings—who are still alive—leave paper trails. But Jami Sherer left no trail at all.
    Taylor, Faddis, and Mains called police departments all over the Northwest to see if they had found any unidentified bodies. “It was interesting,” Taylor said. “Often the police departments told us they had no bodies that were unaccounted for, but when we called the coroners’ offices, they often said, ‘Yeah, we do,’ so we checked a lot of those out. Maybe a dog had brought in bones, or someone had found a skeleton we could compare to what we knew about Jami.”
    They had Jami’s dental records, medical records from knee surgery she once had, and the information from her breast augmentation surgery. They had blood samples from Judy and Jerry Hagel and from Chris Sherer for mitochondrial DNA testing. “We also had some of Jami’s hair,” Taylor said. “Judy had asked for years to have Jami’s things. Finally Steve gave her a box of things, all taped shut. It sat in Judy’s garage until Greg Mains and Mike Faddis opened it to inventory it, and Jami’s hairbrush was in there—with strands of her hair caught in it.”
    But none of