Empty Promises

residential neighborhood in Redmond. He was taking her to his house. As they drove, he told her that he was a recent widower and that he had lost his wife in a car accident.
    Steve’s voice faltered, and she supposed that the death of his wife was a very emotional subject so she didn’t pursue it.
    He pulled into a driveway of a home, but it was very dark outside, so she didn’t think she could identify the house again.
    “It was a split-level,” she said. “I don’t remember what color it was, and it had a driveway that was sort of elevated. The living room was on the left and then the dining room right after that and then the kitchen was like right in front.” Margaret closed her eyes to remember. “And then we went left. There was a bedroom on the right side that was full of kids’ stuff. It was very clean.”
    She had the floor plan right; that fit the house Steve and Jami had lived in.
    She recalled that Steve showed her around, pointing things out, and then led her into the master bedroom. “We just sat on the bed and we were talking.”
    Steve explained that his child or children—she wasn’t sure how many—were at their grandmother’s house. He soon began to talk about his wife. “I was wearing a pearl necklace at the time, and he told me that it wasn’t real, after he rubbed a pearl on his tooth. And he said he would show me a real pearl necklace. So he went into a closet. He pulled out a pearl necklace and told me that was real and he had bought that for his wife.”
    At that point, she said, Steve teared up and began to sob. “He was talking about his ex-wife or dead wife or whatever,” Margaret said. “And then he brought up the subject of a heart, a diamond heart necklace that he had bought her and went to the closet and took it out and showed it to me, and he got very emotional.”
    It wasn’t the best first date Margaret Ryan had ever had. Steve seemed to her to be not only grief-stricken but somehow guilty. That was the only way she could explain it.
    After he showed her the diamond pendant and stopped sobbing, Steve surprised Margaret by lunging at her as she sat on the bed. He pushed her backward and kissed her hard on the lips. “I got bad vibes,” she said, “because of the forcefulness of it. I decided that this was not a comfortable situation for me.”
    When she stood up from the bed and said, “Let’s go,” Steve stopped trying to force himself on her. They left his house and went out to eat at Azteca, a Mexican restaurant.
    Steve never called her for another date, which was fine with Margaret. She didn’t think about him again for years, until she saw his face on television in connection with the reopening of the investigation into his wife’s disappearance.
    Since he had told her several times that his wife had died in a car crash, she was surprised that he was being investigated for the possibility that he had murdered his wife. She was also troubled, of course. Margaret Ryan suffered from agoraphobia, from the Greek for “fear of the marketplace” or, in modern terms, fear of leaving home. Margaret had taken a chance by accepting a date with Steve Sherer, and that had done nothing at all to alleviate her panic attacks.
    Over the years since Jamie was gone, Steve became so consumed with meeting women that he almost seemed to suffer from satyriasis, an obsessive and often uncontrollable sexual desire in men, similar to nymphomania in women. Greg Mains and Mike Faddis learned that Steve was a member of several singles clubs on the east side. He also spent a lot of time on his computer making contacts with women all over the world.
    He had leaped upon Margaret Ryan only moments after he sobbed at the sight of Jami’s diamond heart pendant. Apparently he used any line that he thought would work to add to his roster of women. Was he really grieving for Jami? Or was he posing as a bereaved widower just to soften women up?
    Grieving widowers are lonely, but most of them wait a respectful length of time before they seek out female companionship. Steve Sherer had never shown grief, sadness, or loneliness about losing Jami. The only mourning anyone had noted was for Steve himself, as he asked why such a tragedy should have happened to him. Never once had he voiced sorrow or concern for Jami, or for Chris over the loss of his mother. Jami’s friend Lisa Cryder had seen Steve out partying with a girl only weeks after Jami’s disappearance.
    It was abundantly clear that