Empty Promises

‘You could get rid of a body out there, and no one would ever find it.’ ”
    Greg Mains and Mike Faddis would spend days driving up and down those back roads, especially along 35th S.E., the area where Jeff Caston had quoted Steve’s telling remark. They found three locations that appeared to be reasonable places to look for Jami’s remains. One was the property of a company called Pacific Topsoil on the east side of 35th S.E.
    Fortunately for the detectives, if not for the owner, Pacific Topsoil was under constant surveillance by environmental agencies, that wanted to be sure the topsoil operation didn’t interfere with waterways or forests. So every so often, the owner had arranged for aerial photographs to be taken of the area. He showed the detectives the photos from 1987, 1989, 1990, and 1993.
    In essence, the land was a massive peat bog, and from time to time over that period, it was covered with water. “There were a couple hundred acres there,” Taylor said, “where someone could dispose of a body.”
    The other two sites they thought likely were close by. They knew that Steve needed to dispose of his wife’s body rapidly so he could check in with her mother by early evening. First, the investigators had a chemical analysis done to determine the makeup of the soil and the peat bogs in the area. Depending on the acidity and the alkalinity of the substance tested, bodies left in a site will either decompose rapidly or will last forever: the outer layers will turn to a soap-like substance known as adipocere while the internal organs remain relatively unchanged. Test results indicated that if Jami was in the peat bog or in the other two locations, she would be frozen in time, and if her body should ever be found, she could be identified.
    Cadaver dogs were brought in to search those areas. Necro-search dogs, or cadaver dogs, are trained much like bloodhounds, with rewards and praise when they find what they are supposed to. But different dogs are suited to different search items. Some dogs like to look for living things; cadaver dogs home in on dead tissue, bones, and teeth. Many of them are used in flooded areas, where they can actually sniff down a chimney to see if anyone is alive in houses below water. The best cadaver dogs can smell a body 20 feet below the surface of a body of water. They are incredible creatures, and not in the least macabre. When they’re not working, they are as friendly and cheerful as any pet. And like most search-and-rescue dogs, they travel in their own plane seats and are never relegated to the baggage areas deep in the bowels of the plane.
    Andy Rebmann, retired from the Connecticut State Police, is known worldwide for his work with cadaver dogs. He agreed to bring his dogs in to search for Jami.

    Every Saturday the Redmond detectives were on the 35th S.E. site, watching the dogs work and looking for Jami. Although they had never met her, she was very real to them. They wanted very much to bring her home.
    “We were probing and looking,” Jim Taylor recalls, “but we didn’t find her. What we were able to determine was that on the east side of 35th S.E. there had been an office and a security system at the time of Jami’s disappearance, but farther up, on the other side of the road, there was no gate at that time [1990], and people would go in to dump garbage, or lovers would go there to park. Given that knowledge and the proximity to Steve’s mother’s house—which was a mile, mile and a half at the very most—and what Caston had said, we knew we had to be in the area where he left Jami, or relatively close.”
    Although they had never given much credence to psychics, one of the seers had sent word that Jami Sherer would be found near a “block building” with a big tower with “arms.” About half a mile south of the area the Redmond investigators finally focused on, there was a Seattle City Light building, now fully fenced. When Greg Mains contacted them, one supervisor remembered that there had been a cinder-block building there at one time. It had since been dismantled.
    Taylor, Mains, and Faddis believed they were close to Jami. They went back again and again to wooded areas in South Snohomish County and in the northeastern part of King County. Twice they used police divers and sonar equipment to search the murky bottom of Lake Stevens. There was no way to search Lake Washington where Steve often took his power boat. The vast lake is so cold and so