Empty Promises

cross-examination by the prosecution. No one had yet heard his voice. Did he have some explanation for what had happened to Jami?
    If he chose not to testify, the defense would have to resort to only a handful of witnesses. Sherer was not a man laden with friends. His sisters had both been witnesses for the state, however reluctantly. Laura, the younger of Steve’s two sisters, had testified that Steve had told her that he and Jami had an argument and “she just left.”
    As far as Laura knew, Steve had not had a key to his mother’s house. Usually she or her sister took care of their mother’s home when she was away.
    Saundra, who was next to Steve in birth order, admitted in the state’s case that she had a nonexistent relationship with Steve. “I love him,” she said, “but I don’t like him.”
    Steve had spent at least half of the 1990s in Arizona. Saundra remembered he had called her from Phoenix in the fall of 1995, and that he’d been very upset and sounded as if he’d been drinking. He told her that he had done “bad things” that would upset people if he told them. Saundra remembered that call vividly because Steve was extremely distraught and thought he should sit down and talk with a priest. Saundra had asked if it had something to do with Jami’s disappearance, but Steve didn’t answer. Saundra had been concerned enough to call Laura and ask her to call their uncle who worked at the Seattle crisis clinic. Steve was sounding suicidal again. But he hadn’t killed himself or staged an attempt, as before.
    On the Sunday Jami vanished, Saundra recalled that Steve had phoned her in the evening while she was watching a Star Trek rerun. “That would have been between six and seven P.M. ” She wasn’t sure if he had called an hour or so later, too.
    Now, with the defense case beginning, Saundra was about to testify for the other side.
    There was a legal scuffle as Marilyn Brenneman and Pete Mair both claimed the same witness. In the end, Judge Wartnik allowed Brenneman to cross-examine Saundra, who was now Mair and Camiel’s witness.
    “Do you think that Steve felt guilty because he had something to do with Jami’s disappearance?” Brenneman asked.
    Saundra hesitated, and then answered, “That crossed my mind.”
    “Did you try to help Steve get custody of Chris at your mother’s behest? Would you say that was a family obligation?”
    “That would be fair.”
    “When you saw the spot on the rug [on October 8], was it because you thought it could be blood?”
    “Yes.”
    Mair recalled Laura, to establish how worried the whole family had been that Steve was suicidal.
    Then the defense called Christopher Moon, age forty-one. He was positive he had seen Jami Sherer hanging out in a card room three days after she was supposed to have vanished. He remembered her “because she looked like this girl I used to know in Arkansas. She was small, wearing a plaid top and she had light brownish blond hair. She was there forty-five minutes to an hour. She appeared to be killing time, waiting for someone.”
    It seemed impossible. Jami had been headed for her parents’ house, and she hated card rooms.
    Mair questioned a Redmond businessman who said he had met Steve in September or October 1990, when Steve came into his framing shop. “He was representing an artist who was selling a limited edition of Ken Griffey Jr. baseball prints. He was looking for seed money,” the witness said. “Six months later, Sherer came back in. This time he had a handful of posters about his missing wife and asked if he could put one in the window.
    “I had the impression he was in mourning a year later,” the witness said. “He wasn’t seeing anyone.”
    But on cross-examination, the man admitted that he had actually met Steve well before Jami vanished. The defense was antsy: they were afraid that deputy prosecutor Kristin Richardson was going to bring out the information that the witness once gave Steve a reference as a good employee when, in fact, Steve had never worked for him at all.
    Pete Mair began reading from an earlier transcript, and Judge Wartnik stopped him. “You can’t read transcripts; you have to ask questions.”
    “Why did you believe that Steve was not seeing anyone at that time?” Mair asked the framer.
    “I answered that in 1991 or 1992,” the witness said. “Steve seemed to be in mourning.”
    “Seeing anyone?”
    “I don’t know.”
    “Steve Sherer slept with ten women within