Empty Promises

he needs to figure out a device to cheat anyone out of money, he was brilliant. He knew how to do it and keep himself distanced from it. He was the mastermind. He would get someone else to do it.”
    Caston recalled a time when he was broke and Steve phoned him from Arizona. “He asked me, ‘Are you hungry?’
    “I told him, ‘Yeah, I haven’t eaten.’ He asks me what I want and we hung up. And then Steve calls me back and says, ‘Go over to the McDonald’s next to where you are. And pick up what’s waiting for you.’ Steve had called the McDonald’s and said, ‘Hey, I ordered a bunch of stuff and the order is all wrong. I’d like to pick up the stuff I paid for.’ ”
    Caston shook his head, remembering. Steve’s scam had worked and he had done it all from Arizona. “I walked in and they gave me a big bag of hamburgers and fries, milk shake, all free.”
    While they were in Redmond, Caston said Steve sold him a computer and the two, along with some other friends, put together a gambling pool on the computers. “We had a pool and whoever won the most games at the end of the season was supposed to get the pool,” Caston said. “It was depending on which players you had drafted to your team.”
    Caston wasn’t adept at working with computers, so Steve helped him. He said he and Steve worked on their strategy for winning every weekend. They were either together or on the phone for most of the morning on both Saturday and Sunday and quite often in the evening as well.
    Caston was an early riser; he was wide awake by 5:30 or 6:00 A.M. “I would watch the clock so I could find a decent hour to call. Usually I would get Jami first, and she would be upset because I was calling so early, and I’d say I would call back. I would usually wind up getting hold of them maybe by nine or ten.”
    When Mike Faddis asked him about a particular weekend—September 29 and 30, 1990, Caston said that he hadn’t been able to reach either Jamie or Steve on that Saturday. “So I started calling earlier on Sunday.” He finally got an answer to his calls.
    “Who did you first talk to?” Faddis asked.
    “Jami.”
    It was somewhere between 10:00 and 11:00 A.M. by then, and Jami was in a hurry. “She eventually told me,” Caston recalled, “that they had been gone all weekend and that they had an argument. And she was trying to pack some stuff and get out of there and go over to her mom’s.”
    Caston thought she sounded apprehensive and upset. “She seemed a little scared.”
    He estimated that he talked with her for ten or fifteen minutes. She told him that Steve would probably be back soon, and if he ever needed to talk to her again, he would have to call her at her mother’s house.
    Caston said he waited for twenty minutes and then started calling Steve. Within a few calls, Steve answered. “He was upset,” Jeff Caston said. “I didn’t let on that I had already talked to her. I didn’t want to take sides. Steve told me pretty much what Jami told me, about their having a fight and her going to her mother’s house.”
    One rather odd thing happened as they talked. “Steve said, ‘Did you hear that?’ and I said, ‘Hear what? Is she still there?’ He said, ‘I’ll call you back,’ and he hung up.”
    It was about half an hour before Steve called Caston back, asking him if he had heard Jami yelling in the background.
    “I never heard her at all,” Caston said, “but he told me she had come back for her purse or money or something and that they spoke for a couple of minutes, and then she’d left. He was pretty upset. He didn’t sound like normal.”
    Jeff Caston said he’d offered to go over and talk with Steve, but Steve declined, which in itself was unusual. Steve always liked to have someone who would listen to his troubles when he was upset. When Steve called Caston next, it was about one o’clock in the afternoon. “Steve told me Jami had disappeared. He was really upset then.”
    Steve told Caston that Jami had never arrived at her parents’ home, and Caston had tried to calm him down, saying that she probably stopped on the way or that maybe her mother was just telling him that. “I told him to get some sleep—they both should get some sleep—and something to eat and talk about it later.”
    Later that afternoon, when Caston called back, there was no answer at Steve’s house. Sometime in early evening, Steve had called him, saying he was at his mother’s house to sleep because he