Empty Promises

Chris’s sake, Judy maintained a friendly relationship with his other grandmother, and Chris visited Sherri’s home occasionally. Sherri and Wally had him over for birthday parties and at Christmastime, and sometimes Chris went on trips to Lake Chelan with his aunts and Sherri and Wally. Less often, he spent time with his father, although it was agreed by everyone that it would be best if he didn’t travel alone to visit Steve in Arizona. His grandmother Sherri escorted him on his visits to the Southwest.
    He saw Chris infrequently, however. Mains and Faddis learned there was good reason not to leave Chris alone with his father for long. One day, when Chris was about eight, Steve told him that he had business to take care of. They drove out into what was essentially desert. There, Steve left Chris in the car in the hot sun for almost an hour. The boy survived, but apparently Steve hadn’t the slightest concern for his son’s safety.
    Steve lived in Scottsdale most of the time from the mid- to late nineties. He seemed to sense that Jim Taylor, Mike Faddis, and Greg Mains were circling closer and closer. He usually worked as a cabdriver, and he somehow fashioned an I.D. that didn’t draw dozens of hits for traffic violations when he applied for an Arizona cabdriver’s license. His boss, Joseph Volpe, told the Redmond detectives that a clean driving record was mandatory for their drivers. Volpe said that Steve lived in his mother’s home in the Spanish Oaks section of Scottsdale. “One day he told me his son was coming out to visit,” Volpe recalled. “He said his mother was bringing him, and then he said, ‘My wife was killed in a car crash.’ ”
    Steve’s year with the cab company ended abruptly. “One day he called,” Volpe said. “He said he’d met some girls and was partying and still drunk. I went to get our car and the pager at his mother’s house.”
    Steve’s drinking and drugging continued, making him emotionally chaotic. One night while he was living in Arizona, he called his sister and threatened to kill himself, but the family managed to talk him out of it—if, indeed, he had really intended to take his own life.
    There was something peculiar about Steve’s travels: He always carried a heavy suitcase with him. It was an old suitcase, made of light blue simulated leather, with wide straps that buckled over the zipper so that the contents were secure. Even during the times when he was without funds and had to ride the bus, Steve lugged that blue suitcase with him.
    The only constant they were discovering in Steve Sherer’s life was that there were no constants. Over the eight years since Jami disappeared, Steve had continued to tell different stories to different people about what had become of his wife. He embroidered the story as the years passed, sometimes showing new acquaintances creased and yellowed newspaper stories about Jami. He usually varied his accounts of her disappearance by sticking to three basic scenarios: Jami had been kidnapped, Jami had been killed in a car accident, or Jami had divorced him. He had a more chilling version, however: he told one friend that Jami was the “last victim of a serial killer.”
    A Phoenix, Arizona, man told Greg Mains that he knew Steve from playing poker with him at the Casino Arizona in 1998.
    “Did he ever talk about his wife?” Mains asked.
    “Steve told me that his wife was murdered five or six years ago,” the man recalled. “He said the person who did it was in prison.”
    One woman told Mike Faddis and Greg Mains that she had been romantically involved with Steve’s friend Ron Coates in 1990. She and Ron had spent a night at Steve’s house during the autumn after Jami disappeared.
    “I met Steve at a café. There was another woman there. We went out on Steve’s boat.” This informant—Victoria—said she and the other woman, Steve’s date, later went to buy more beer. During the time they were gone, Ron and Steve evidently did a good deal of talking. Ron was curious after Steve explained that his wife was missing. “He [Ron] was somewhat alarmed about what Steve had told him,” Victoria recalled. “Ron told me later, ‘I think he did it!’ ”
    Ron Coates went to the top of their list to interview. Mains and Faddis only needed to locate him.
    On February 26, 1998, Greg Mains met with a man on the other side of the Cascade Mountains in Yakima, Washington. Alan Aboli* had worked with Steve at a sports merchandise