“Is this how your department treats widows?” Mercy asked. “You harass them over the kind of details anyone would be dealing with after something like this?”
“Most of the widows I meet aren’t sitting on multimillion-dollar life insurance policies.”
“That’s enough,” Mercy said. “You need to leave. My sister is in mourning and doesn’t deserve this.”
“Did Dale deserve a knife to the chest?”
“Yes!” Trisha said.
“Trisha.”
Ignoring her sister, Trisha said, “He deserved anything he got after the way he lied to me and disrespected our marriage and family for the entire time we were together. He was an addict when we met and hid it from me until it was too late. By the time I found out, we had two children, a mortgage, car payments and stacks of debt from his recklessness. We spent more than a hundred thousand dollars on rehab, and none of it worked. After the last time, he swore to me that everything would be different. He begged me not to leave him and to give him one more chance to show me who he could be when he was clean. Except he was never clean. It was more lies, and look at me now, with another child to care for on my own. So yes, if someone stabbed him in the chest, he probably deserved it.”
“Did you have anything to do with him being stabbed?”
Her face lost all color in an instant. “What?” She glanced at her sister. “What is she saying?”
“I asked if you had anything to do with your husband being stabbed.”
“Get out of here,” Mercy said. “How dare you come into her home and accuse her of such a thing?”
“Did you have anything to do with it?” Neveah asked Mercy.
“Fuck you.”
Neveah reached into her coat pocket, withdrew the warrant and handed it to Mercy. “This is a warrant for both of your phones. I’ll need you to turn them over to me. Now.”
“You can’t take our phones!” Trisha said. “This is outrageous. We haven’t done anything.”
“If that’s the case, they’ll be returned to you as soon as they’re processed.”
“I want a lawyer,” Trisha said.
“You’re free to engage with counsel, but the phones are still coming with us. You can either retrieve them immediately, or we’ll bring in officers to search the house for them.”
“You can’t do this!” Trisha cried.
“That piece of paper says I can. Now, what’s it going to be? I’m giving you two minutes to produce the phones before we call in backup.”
“What’re we supposed to do without our phones?” Mercy asked.
“That’s not my problem, ma’am.”
She engaged in a stare-down with Mercy that ended when the other woman blinked.
Neveah noticed that Mercy’s hands were trembling.
After a long silence, Neveah turned to Anthony. “Detective Anthony, will you ask your colleagues to come in to look for the phones?”
“I’ll take care of that right away.”
“Wait,” Trisha said. “We have nothing to hide. You can have them.”
“Trisha—”
“Be quiet, Mercy, and get the phones.”
With a furious look for her sister, Mercy got up to retrieve both phones from chargers in the kitchen.
