Fatal Romance: A True Story of Obsession and Murder Page 2

  That’s Peter and Christy’s house, Adam thought. He knew that the families shared a common driveway and that Peter and his wife had children of similar ages to the Akers kids. He even remembered hearing something about all of their kids attending the same private school.

  The scene inside Peter’s house must be insufferable, Adam imagined, unable to reconcile the emotional state of the two young Akers children witnessing their father shooting their mother and then watching him take off in a frenzied rage.

  Even more frightening was the idea that this madman was armed and driving through the city, bent on who knew what kind of destruction.

  CHAPTER TWO

  The ring of the telephone shattered the stillness of the night. Bill Ranger sat up abruptly in bed, and took a moment to get his bearings. It wasn’t that late, just about 11:30, but he had turned in unusually early—especially for a Saturday night.

  It wasn’t Bill’s habit to answer the phone, so as usual he let the machine pick up. Too many times the caller turned out to be an old girlfriend making one last attempt at reining in the confirmed bachelor. The fifty-two-year-old Navy reservist sat in the dark and listened for a while, not really wanting to get out of bed and still hazy from the deep sleep that had enveloped him. But the familiar baritone at the other end of the line startled him into full alertness, especially when he heard the words, “I want to be buried at Arlington Cemetery.”

  Throwing off the covers, he sprang out of bed and picked up the receiver. By the time he crossed the room, the machine had recorded a solid minute of the frantic diatribe.

  “Akers!” Ranger barked into the phone. “What are you talking about?”

  “I shot Nancy.”

  His friend’s words hit him like a fist in the chest. His first reaction was that what he was hearing couldn’t possibly be true.

  “This is a really bad joke,” Ranger declared.

  Even as he said the words, his stomach tightened. He knew perfectly well that Jeremy Akers wasn’t one to kid around.

  For twenty years, Bill Ranger and Jeremy Akers had traveled in the same circles, attending the same parties and socializing with the same people. A mutual friend had introduced them more than twenty years before. As soon as Jeremy learned that Bill had served as an enlisted navy seal in Vietnam, he decided to count him among his select group of friends. As far as Jeremy was concerned, there were two kinds of people: those who had served their country and those who hadn’t. Ranger always found Jeremy to be a real black-and-white kind of guy. Either he liked you, or he didn’t, and he made no bones about telling you if he didn’t. When talking about Jeremy, four words immediately came to Ranger’s mind: intense, discerning, critical, and loyal.

  “No, I’m serious,” Akers insisted in the same low-pitched tone, his Alabama drawl still thick even after twenty years in Washington, DC. “I killed Nancy. I shot her.”

  Hearing Nancy Richards Akers’ name made his stomach clench even more. While he and Akers had been friends for two decades, Bill had met the woman who had become his friend’s wife even earlier. He had been studying at Georgetown University, attending the Foreign Service school, when he first met the pretty, dark-haired Mt. Vernon College coed. She was a regular at Clyde’s of Georgetown, a popular tavern frequented by students from both schools, and the place where Bill was employed as a waiter on a part-time basis. He remembered that she often stopped in after Sunday brunch to pick up her roommate, a hostess at the M Street eatery whom he had dated for a short time. It had been a surprising coincidence when his new friend Akers showed up at a party with his young bride and Ranger discovered that he already knew her.

  Jeremy and Nancy had been introduced while they were both working on Capitol Hill—he as a lawyer for the Justice Department, she as a speechwriter for a US Congressman, Sam Ervin of North Carolina. Both of them had energetically pursued their careers, with Jeremy becoming a respected environmental attorney who traveled all over the country investigating Superfund toxic waste cleanup sites and oil spills, and Nancy dazzling the publishing world with her success as an author of more than a dozen steamy romance novels.

  While Ranger was extremely fond of them both, he had always been struck by how well the couple demonstrated the old saying, “Opposites attract.” He saw Nancy as a bohemian, sweet and nurturing but with a delightful sense of style. Yet her free-spiritedness belied her roots as a society girl who had even “debuted” at a coming-out party thrown by her blueblood grandparents. Jeremy, meanwhile, came from modest means. While he loved his family, and returned home to Alabama often, Ranger noted that he clearly preferred that part of his life to be unknown. He did not want to be thought of as the “good old boy” from the South, preferring instead to be recognized as a graduate of the University of Virginia’s School of Law, and a successful DC attorney.

  Jeremy was completely fearless, and as a young man, he hunted alligators for sport. He had been decorated for valor in Vietnam, receiving the Silver Star—the third highest honor bestowed on a Marine. Nancy was the soft-spoken peacemaker, while Jeremy would fight to the end if he believed he was right—even if it meant putting himself and others in danger.

  But as someone who had never married, Ranger felt he was in no position to judge the suitability of the pair. Besides, he had spent a great deal of time with the Akerses over the years, and had always found them to be compatible, at least as far as he could see.

  Still finding his friend’s whole bizarre admission difficult to believe, he decided to shift gears.

  “Okay, Akers,” he said, hoping that his matter-of-fact tone would bring out “the real truth,” which he expected would be a repudiation of the grisly confession. “What did you do—and how long ago?”

  “About thirty minutes ago,” Jeremy replied dryly.

  The conversation was beginning to feel surreal to Bill. But slowly he was coming around to believing that his buddy could actually be speaking the truth.

  A vision of what might have happened began forming in his mind. He knew that Nancy had left her family, and that Jeremy had been devastated by the fact that she quickly moved in with another man more than twenty years his junior. The fact that the interloper was a truck driver—someone Jeremy considered beneath both him and his wife, and a bad influence on his children—had caused his anger to escalate into rage. Nevertheless, Ranger believed that Akers had found a way to deal with the trauma. Nancy had left him the previous October, and it was now June 5, 1999.

  He remembered the day his friend had broken the news to him. It was just like any other day when “Popeye”—his nickname for Akers because of the former Marine’s compact, muscular frame—flagged him down.

  Ranger assumed that, as usual, Akers was looking for a jogging partner. Instead, the look on his face immediately told him something else was up.

  Akers leaned into the car so that his face was a few inches away from Ranger’s. It was one of his habits that most people found disconcerting—that, and the gold eye tooth that Jeremy was so proud of. “Nancy left me,” he said.

  Ranger could see how broken Jeremy was as he spewed forth his frustration and anger. But most prominent was his utter disbelief. “No one leaves me,” he growled.

  That had been eight months earlier, and while he had talked about it obsessively, Ranger just presumed that Jeremy was finding a way to deal with it.

  Now, faced with this bizarre admission, Ranger began to wonder whether Akers really had killed Nancy. He imagined a scenario at the cramped one-bedroom apartment that Nancy and her new lover Jim had taken together—ironically, just a few blocks away from the elegant red-brick Federal-style house in which Jeremy and Nancy had lived for nearly fifteen years of their marriage.

  “What’d you do, go down to the apartment?” Ranger asked, choosing his words cautiously.

  “No, no. It was in front of the house, and I’m only sorry that I didn’t get him.”

  Ranger knew immediately to whom he was referring.

  “I wanted to
get them together, and I’m disappointed that I couldn’t.”

  “I shot her in front of the house,” he continued, his voice unwavering as he described the macabre scenario to his friend. “She was in the car.”

  Suddenly another thought popped into Ranger’s mind. “Where were the kids?”

  “On the front steps of the porch,” Jeremy replied.

  Ranger’s heart stopped. “You’ve got to be kidding me.”

  Like everybody else who knew him, Ranger knew how much Jeremy adored his two sons, Finny and Zeb, and his daughter, Isabelle. He took them everywhere with him: to the park, on hikes, to Alabama to visit his family every chance he got. Because both men’s houses were in the same neighborhood, Ranger had to pass the Akers residence every time he went to what he jokingly referred to as his “blue collar Safeway.” And just about every time he went by, he spotted the square-shouldered, five-foot, seven-inch former Marine on the front lawn playing with his children. If they weren’t engaged in an energetic game of Frisbee, they would be romping with the family’s rottweiler or climbing onto their bikes for a ride to the nearby park.

  But something had gone terribly wrong.

  Bill was back to thinking the whole grisly story had to be a hoax. Akers’ contention that the children were on the front steps during the episode he was describing was just too out of character to be taken seriously.

  In fact, he remembered Akers saying something about a hearing that was scheduled for just two weeks away. He wasn’t certain, but he believed that the meeting might have been to determine the custody of the two minor children. In their twenty years of friendship, Ranger had never known Akers to be afraid of anything. The possible loss of his kids was the first thing he had ever reacted to with fear.

  “Take me through this again.” Ranger rubbed the tensed muscles of his forehead. “Let’s start from the beginning.”

  “I did it down the street, with the kids on the porch,” Jeremy repeated in the same matter-of-fact tone.

  “That’s just incredible—that you did it in front of the kids.”

  “This is a very bad joke,” Ranger finally declared after the conversation had continued for close to twenty minutes. He still hoped that his friend was making up a story, but his attitude slowly shifted from one of shock and denial to a more somber, contemplative state. For a moment he was silent, as he struggled to imagine what could have possibly triggered such an extreme reaction.

  “She left me, and I cannot take that she left me,” Akers told his friend in a deep, prosaic voice. “In the car tonight, I was trying to give her another chance, and she said no.”

  A hundred conversations that he had had with Akers replayed in Ranger’s mind. For months, during their frequent fifteen-mile jogs around the nearby reservoir, he had listened to Akers’ tirades against his wife. Her abandonment of him, especially for another man, went against the grain of everything he believed in as a religious Christian, raised in a backwoods northern Alabama town where traditional values were revered. The culture that had shaped Jeremy remained very much a part of him. Ranger knew that his friend was finding it impossible to come to terms with an unfaithful wife.

  “Akers, you’re scaring me. Did you really do this?” Ranger persisted, his shock turning to anger. “Your ego got in the way. Think about Zeb and Isabelle. What’s going to happen to them?”

  Everything, he realized, was out of control. Akers was talking from an upside-down world. If he’d killed his wife in front of the kids, what was he going to do next? Jeremy was a loose cannon, and this scared even the calm, cool Ranger.

  “Please let me come and get you,” Ranger pleaded. “Where are you?”

  Akers’ reply made his blood run cold. “It’s too late. I’m not going to jail. I’m going on a new and different voyage.”

  “I think you’re probably insane at this stage, and that you can plead insanity,” Ranger retorted.

  “As an attorney,” Jeremy replied calmly, “I know that wouldn’t work.”

  “Let me come get you,” Ranger insisted. “Just tell me where you are.”

  When Akers refused to answer, Ranger tried a different tack. “What’s going to happen to the kids?”

  “The neighbors will take care of them.” Akers was referring to a couple who lived next door to him on Reservoir Road. “I just hope what I’ve done doesn’t upset Chrissy.”

  “Chrissy?” Ranger was puzzled. Who the devil was he talking about?

  “The neighbor’s wife,” Akers responded. “She’s eight months pregnant. I hope that what I’ve done doesn’t have a negative impact on the baby.”

  Ranger was speechless. That his friend would now be concerned about his neighbor’s unborn child was difficult to fathom, given what he had just admitted.

  “I’m going to give you my parents’ number,” Akers continued. “But don’t call them, because they’re old.”

  Now that Jeremy had mentioned his family, Ranger realized he didn’t know how many brothers and sisters his friend had. But Akers had thought of that, too.

  “I have an older brother and a younger sister,” Akers explained. “W. T. and Carolyn.”

  “Where are your medals and your service jacket?” Ranger asked.

  “If you can get into the house,” he replied, “there’s an envelope upstairs with twenty-eight hundred dollars in cash for the kids. And speaking of the kids, I’m counting on you to explain it to them, and tell them that I love them.” Ranger could hear the tone of his friend’s voice soften when he mentioned the children.

  Somberly Jeremy added, “I love my country, but I just couldn’t live with the shame of my wife leaving me.”

  Then Akers repeated the words that he had said to his friend many times, that he wanted to be buried at Arlington. Ranger listened intently. He waited. He wanted more information. Mirroring Akers’ calm tone, the decorated naval officer decided to be strategic. “Okay, Akers, I’ll honor your request, but where do I find the body?” Ranger inquired, thinking that if his friend were close by, he could reach him before it was too late.

  But Jeremy replied, “I’m not going to tell you. I don’t want to give you that responsibility.”

  Ranger said once again, “Let me come pick you up.”

  He could tell immediately that Akers was becoming anxious.

  “I have to go and take care of business.”

  “Jeremy, I am begging you not to do this. And I don’t beg for anything.”

  He hoped that showing his urgency might work more effectively than the other ploys he had tried.

  “You’re a good friend, Ranger,” Akers said. “I’ve got to go.”

  As Ranger started begging him once again to listen to reason, he heard his friend say, “Goodbye.”

  The next thing he heard was a dial tone.

  * * *

  Frantically, Ranger pressed *-6-9 on his cordless phone. His heart crumpled when he didn’t recognize the number that he was given, especially since the 202 area code indicated that Jeremy was close by, calling from somewhere inside Washington.

  Ranger punched in 9-1-1.

  A woman’s voice answered. “Nine-one-one. Where is your emergency?”

  “A friend of mine I believe just killed his wife and is about to kill himself,” Ranger reported, struggling to keep his voice in control. “Here’s the number where he’s calling from.”

  “What’s his address?” the operator asked methodically.

  Intense frustration rose inside Ranger like a wave. Trying to get cooperation from her, he thought, was like pulling teeth out of a hen. “No, he’s not calling from home. He’s calling from this number, and if you can trace this number right away, you might be able to find him.”

  “Fine. Thanks.”

  When he heard the click that told him she had hung up, his level of annoyance reached unbearable levels. Still clutching the receiver of the cordless Sony, he ran through his house to the driveway.

  He leaped into his car, and sped the quart
er of a mile from his own home to Jeremy’s, on the same street. Reservoir Road was an unlikely place for a crime to be committed. It was the home of several embassies, including the French Embassy and the German Embassy. While the police respected the wishes of the well-heeled residents and made a point of not being an obvious presence, they were vigilant about maintaining order in this high-profile section of the District of Columbia.

  “I know Akers is not a bullshit kind of guy,” he thought, grimly gripping the wheel. “Maybe there’s a chance, a four-point-two percent chance, that this didn’t happen.”

  But as he neared the Akerses’ elegant red-brick residence, the flicker of emergency lights told him otherwise.

  Reservoir Road was entirely blocked off. Police cars were lined up, blocking the street so that no one could approach the house. The emergency lights, whirling from the roofs, cast an eerie glow over the posh neighborhood. The uniformed cops and plainclothes detectives milling around were a peculiar contrast to the dignified German Embassy directly across the street from his friend’s house.

  The drama of the scene was heightened by the fact that the embassy had set up its own barricade. The extensive stretch of property that housed the modern, multileveled building was shielded from the street by a tall, forbidding iron fortress. It was considered foreign soil, and uniformed German security personnel armed with sub-machine guns had been ordered to create a barricade in front of the chancellery. They, too, had heard the shots, and their immediate response had been to go into high alert mode and defend the foreign embassy in case the shooting turned out to be a security threat. Ranger suddenly felt as if he’d been catapulted into a Fellini film.

  He knew immediately that the worst was true. Akers had done the unthinkable. He really had murdered his wife.

  * * *

  Metropolitan Police Sergeant Michael Farish had been less than a half-mile away, patrolling the fashionable streets of downtown Georgetown, when the emergency call, “Shots fired!” crackled over his radio. Glancing at the digital clock on the car’s dashboard, he had noted that it was exactly 10: 27 p.m.