Empty Promises

just wasn’t “comfortable” at his house.
    “Did you ever talk to Jami again?” Faddis asked.
    “Never.”
    Jeff Caston described Jami as a wonderful mother and said he was sure she would never have left Chris voluntarily, “never in a million years,” he said.
    Over the next few days, Caston recalled that Steve continued to be agitated and upset. He picked up Jeff Caston to ride with him while he drove around, looking for Jami’s car. Indeed, Steve ultimately called him to tell him that the car had been found, and Caston said they drove to the place where it was parked, by the church.
    “Were the police there?” Faddis asked, intrigued. He had been there himself soon after the car was located, but he hadn’t seen Steve there.
    “No.” Caston said. “The car was just sitting there, and there wasn’t any yellow police tape on it and there was no one around.”
    Is it possible that Steve actually drove Jeff Caston to Jami’s car before the police found it? Is it possible that he had known where it was all along?
    A few days after Jami vanished, Caston said, Steve asked him to go with him to his mother’s house. “He had forgotten his key to his mother’s house, and he said he had to break a window to get in,” Caston said. “He asked me to repair it.”
    Caston agreed to that, and Steve drove him to Sherri and Wally Schielke’s house in Mill Creek so he could take measurements to get glass cut. He was surprised at that time to see a shovel in the back of Steve’s Blazer. Caston had never known him to carry tools because he just wasn’t handy. Steve told Caston that he had borrowed the shovel from his mother and had to return it.
    Steve wanted the long, narrow window beside the front door of his mother’s house repaired as quickly as possible, as she was on her way home from Cancún after hearing about Jami’s disappearance. Faddis knew that Sherri Schielke had come back from Mexico on Wednesday, October 3, three days after Jami vanished. That pinned down the time of the window repair.
    When Mike Faddis reported his interview with Jeff Caston, it sounded to Jim Taylor as if Steve never had a key to his mother’s house—but that something had distressed him so much on that last day when anyone talked to Jami that he couldn’t bear to stay in his own house. His own house scared him, and so he ran to his mother’s even though she wasn’t there, and he broke a window to get in.
    “Mike,” Taylor said, “go find Jeff Caston. Take him up to the Schielke house, but don’t tell him how to get there. He’s going to tell you—and be sure that he’s the one who determines the route. I don’t care where he takes you. He can take you to Mount Vernon, for all I care. You drive and just follow his directions.”
    As hopeless as such a search might seem, they were still looking for Jami’s body. They worked within the framework of the five hours when Steve was incommunicado on the afternoon of September 30. The very fact that he had missed his every-fifteen-minute call that afternoon made his activities highly suspect. No one they had talked to— no one —had heard from Steve between 1:00 P.M. and 6:00 P.M. If Steve had killed Jami in their own home, he would have had to dispose of her body, probably bury it somewhere, and get back to his house in time to call her mother again. The Redmond investigators figured he had a period of an hour and a half to actually get Jami’s body out of the house, dispose of it, and be back at his mother’s house.
    With Jeff Caston picking the route, Mike Faddis felt his heart leap when his passenger did not take the 405 freeway, but rather directed him to a two-lane back road that led north, winding its way to Mill Creek from Redmond. It was October and the Cascade Mountains off to their right were already dusted with snow. The date and the weather were almost exactly right; Jeff Caston had driven this route with Steve Sherer eight years earlier, and the mountains would have looked the same. They were twenty-five or thirty miles away, but they looked close enough to reach out and touch.
    It was Jim Taylor’s contention all along that someone with guilty knowledge of Jami Sherer’s fate would have a compulsion to confess. As Faddis and Caston drew closer to a short road that cut over to the Schielke house in Mill Creek, Jeff Caston gestured toward a desolate area to the east and said, “You know, when we went by here, Steve kind of waved his arm and said,