Empty Promises

investigating Jami Sherer’s disappearance. “The case is still open, you know,” he explained. “We’re investigating any new leads we can find.”
    Grant Logan said he and his wife had been friends of Sherri Schielke’s for over twenty-five years. They had known her and David Sherer since the early days of construction in Mill Creek. The Logans, along with Wally Schielke and the Sherers, often wintered in Palm Desert. The men played golf together in the California sun while Chelan was covered with drifting snow.
    “What was Steve like when he was growing up?” Mains asked.
    “We only saw him once in a while—during the summer when he vacationed over here with Sherri.”
    “Was he a problem kid?”
    “Never violent or aggressive,” Logan said quickly. “Just the usual preteen, pubescent temper tantrums.”
    When Mains said he understood that Logan and Wally Schielke sometimes played golf together, and that they had a conversation about the theft of a gun from Wally’s house, Logan tensed. “Can you recall the details of that conversation?” Mains asked.
    Logan said that Wally had told him a gun was stolen, and that it was “inferred” that Steve took it because he was the only one in the house when the theft occurred.
    “About David Sherer’s suicide …” Mains began.
    “What does that have to do with Jami being missing?” Logan asked.
    “Part of our investigation always looks at family violence and the long-term effect it has, sometimes for generations,” Mains answered.
    Grant Logan said he had no idea why David Sherer had killed himself. He knew he was an alcoholic and he and Sherri had been fighting. He could only surmise that David had probably been drunk and alone. Beyond that, he had no answers.
    “Who found David Sherer?” Mains asked.
    “Sherri—and she called me and John Walcker.”
    Mains was never an overtly tough interrogator; his forte was his dogged pursuit of what he wanted. He was deliberately mild as he asked the Logans to give him a written statement about the conversation Grant had with Wally over his stolen gun. Mains looked up from his paperwork and saw the Logans exchange a glance.
    “I don’t think I should do that,” Logan said. “I don’t think I should write anything down, until I get the opportunity to talk to my attorney.”
    At that point, the interview was abruptly over. When they again contacted the Logans’ son and asked him to give a statement about the gun theft, he stonewalled them too. His parents insisted that they wanted nothing to do with a reopening of the suicide investigation into the death of David Sherer. As far as Jami Sherer’s disappearance was concerned, they had nothing to offer the detectives.

    In the meantime Steve Sherer must have been getting some information from his jail visitors. Even though he had always skated away before, he must have felt a chill in the wind.
    Mains and Faddis traveled a lot in 1998, and it probably wasn’t good for Steve Sherer’s peace of mind to hear that they had been in Chelan and Scottsdale and Palm Desert and Mill Creek and Redmond and Puyallup and a dozen other places he frequented. Nor would he have been serene if he’d known how many people who knew him or who had once known him had spoken to the detective partners.
    Sometimes the cops got really lucky. More often, it took them months, even years, to locate witnesses. One of the dead ends that Greg Mains and Mike Faddis kept running into was an empty space in their chronology of Jami and Steve’s relationship: the time they lived in Palm Desert in 1986. Judy Hagel tried to help, but she wasn’t sure exactly what had gone on during the months Jami lived with Steve in the mobile home.
    She knew that they had shared the rent with a young woman for a while, and she knew her name: Sally Kirwin. Judy even knew that there had been some kind of an incident with a knife and that Steve had been so out of control that Jami had called home, crying.
    “But the next day, she said everything was all right,” Judy said. “Jami told me not to come.”
    “We’d been looking for Sally Kirwin for almost nine years,” Greg Mains said, “and we couldn’t find her. And then I did—back in Wisconsin!” He phoned her and found she was still extremely upset by her memories of Steve Sherer.
    Mains wanted to ask Sally about the alleged burglary of the mobile home and hoped that it might have occurred while she was living with Steve and Jami. Since the