With her heart pounding like a bass drum in her ears, Neveah pointed toward the hallway that led to the bedrooms. Williams nodded and indicated that he’d follow her. She passed two empty bedrooms decorated for children and stopped at the doorway to the main bedroom, where an unmade king-sized bed took up most of the available space.
She moved quietly into the room and used her right foot to open a closet door.
The first thing she saw was Trisha with a handgun pointed at the head of her son while her daughter and the baby slept on the floor next to her.
Neveah immediately suspected they’d been drugged.
Trisha eyes had a wild, unhinged look to them. “I don’t want to kill him.”
Cody’s blue eyes were huge with fright and possibly shock.
“There’s no need to kill anyone,” Neveah said.
“You’re not taking me away from my kids.” She tightened the arm she had around Cody’s neck. “I’ll kill us all before that’ll happen.”
“Your kids are counting on you to do the right thing for them,” Neveah said.
“I did the right thing for my kids! He was going to drag us all down with him—again. I couldn’t let that happen. You don’t know what it was like! We survived a nightmare. A freaking nightmare, and he was using again.” She began to cry. “He promised me that was all behind us. He said we should have another baby to celebrate his recovery. Two days after Zach was born, I found out the truth. He’d never stopped. What would you have done?”
Neveah empathized with her, but there were a lot of things Trisha could’ve done short of plotting her husband’s murder.
“Put down the gun, Trisha. Let your son go. He hasn’t done anything to deserve being hurt, and I’m worried about Reagan and Zach. It doesn’t look like they’re breathing.”
“They’re fine. They’re just sleeping.”
“They’re not fine. You’re their mom. They’re counting on you to get help for them. Can we help them?”
She cast a nervous glance at Reagan and the baby, who were preternaturally still.
Neveah acted before she fully thought through the plan, diving toward Trisha while she was briefly distracted, knocking the gun from Trisha’s hand as Neveah screamed at Cody to run.
He bolted from the closet and into the arms of Detective Williams.
Neveah knelt on Trisha’s back to cuff her. “Get EMS for the kids.”
“They’re coming in now,” Williams said. “That was impressive, Detective. Did you play football in high school?”
She released a nervous laugh as she pulled Trisha to her feet to get her out of the way of the paramedics.
“You can’t take me from my babies!” Trisha said on a scream.
Neveah wanted to tell her she should’ve thought of her kids when she and her sister were plotting her husband’s murder, but she decided it wasn’t worth wasting her breath. She’d figure that out soon enough on her own.
* * *
Gonzo had arranged transport through the U.S. Marshals Service’s Justice Prisoner Air Transportation System, known as JPATS. As soon as Neveah notified him that the women were in custody, he told her two marshals were standing by to help get them back to DC. They met her outside the Carver home, where the women were being held in separate Patrol vehicles.
“Let’s get them loaded up,” said Deputy Marshal Getty, a man of about forty with buzz-cut gray hair and steely blue eyes. His partner, a Black woman with pretty brown eyes named Deputy Marshal Singer, nodded to Neveah.
“Heard you made a hell of an arrest in there, Detective,” Singer said. “Congratulations.”
“Thanks and for the assistance in getting them home.”
“That’s what we do,” Getty said. “We’ve got a plane standing by at the airport.”
When Neveah opened the back door of the cruiser where Trisha was being held, she began screaming for her children. “Where are they? What’ve you done with them?”
Neveah ignored her shrieks, as well as Mercy’s, as she helped transfer them to the marshals’ vehicle.
