Page 120 of The Furies

Louis and I stood before Melissa, both of us already armed.

“Are you hurt?” I said.

She shook her head, and stood aside to let us enter. The door opened straight into the living room. Behind it was a small kitchen, accessed through an alcove, with a serving hatch on one side that doubled as a dining counter. Donnie Packard was sprawled on his back in the opening, dressed only in his underwear. Like Melissa, he had a lot of blood on him, but it was all his own, and most of it had come from the wound in his chest. The carving knife responsible lay close by.

“He found the phone,” said Melissa. “He wasn’t going to let me leave. Not tonight, not ever.”

I looked at her. She put her right thumb in her mouth and began sucking on it like a child. She seemed to have forgotten her hand was bloody; that, or she no longer cared.

Louis closed the front door, but I barely registered the sound. I was thinking of what lay ahead for Melissa. If you believe the law treats men and women equally, you’re deluded, willfully or otherwise, because the same gender injustices apply there as elsewhere. Most courts fail to take a history of abuse into account when sentencing women for violent crimes against their abuser. Even when the defense produces an expert witness, the prosecution can seek to invalidate the testimony by arguing that the woman failed to leave the relationship when she had the chance, and that’s assuming the judge permits the evidence of historic abuse to be presented to a jury to begin with. On average, women lose self-defense cases 25 percent more frequently than men, and justifiable homicide cases 10 percent more often. The system is inherently misogynistic, tainted by a male fear of the rage of women that dates back to Clytemnestra, Judith, and Medea. Now Melissa Thombs was going to jail, perhaps for decades, all because we had been a few minutes too late to help her.

“Where does Donnie keep his gun?” I asked.

“What?” said Melissa. Her eyes were dull with shock.

“His gun. Where is it?”

“In his bedside table, the one on the left. It has a false back. Tap it hard enough and it comes away.”

I pulled back on the plastic gloves I’d used earlier to search the room at the Braycott. I went to the table, pulled it from the wall, and struck the back. As Melissa had said, it detached. In the revealed space sat a battered Hi-Point with a taped grip. I checked the magazine. It was full, but the chamber was empty. I racked the slide, chambered a round, and brought the gun to the living room.

“Was Donnie right- or left-handed?” I said.

Melissa took her thumb from her mouth. “Right-handed.”

“Have you ever handled this gun?”

She shook her head.

“You’re sure?”

“Yes.”

I touched the gun firmly to the dead man’s fingers, making sure I got an index print full on the trigger, then placed the weapon on the floor by his right hand, but away from the bloodstain.

“I don’t understand,” she said, but I thought she might be starting to.

“You killed an unarmed man, Melissa. It doesn’t matter what he’d done to you in the past, or what you claim he was going to do to you in the future. By the time you get out of prison, you’ll be a middle-aged woman if you’re lucky, and an old one if you’re not. But that’s one version of the story.”

I stared down at my second corpse of the evening.

“So why,” I said, “don’t you tell me another?”

* * *

I CALLED MOXIE CASTIN for the second time that evening and informed him that we had arrived at the Packard house to find Melissa Thombs had stabbed her partner in self-defense. A gun—an illegally held weapon, given Donnie Packard’s domestic violence conviction—was lying by the body. Moxie said he’d be right over, and warned us to hold off on calling the police until he got there. But I didn’t need to be told because I wasn’t a fool, or not that kind of fool anyway.

Louis went outside to wait with Angel. I stayed with Melissa. She sat with her back to the body, but I sat facing it. Call it some version of penance. What should you do when every choice you’re offered is the wrong one, when every compromise you have to make will cost another piece of your soul? Donnie didn’t deserve to die, but neither did Melissa deserve to go to prison for decades because of what she’d done—not if she was telling the truth about what had happened, although that should have been for a court to decide. Yet if the courts can’t be trusted, what then? If the system is fractured and prejudiced, how can justice have any meaning?

The doorbell rang. I answered it. Moxie stood on the doorstep.

“Okay,” he said, “you can make the call now.”

CHAPTER LI

Melissa Thombs was taken to Yarmouth PD headquarters and was set to spend most of the night there, but she would have Moxie by her side. The gun was the clincher, he said, as I walked him to his car so he could follow Melissa to Middle Street. No prosecutor would want to stake their reputation on this case, not with an unlicensed weapon in the possession of a domestic abuser. It meant that Donnie Packard’s history of violence would have to be acknowledged, and juries were less likely to convict if presented with that kind of evidence.

“Death caused ‘while under the influence of extreme anger or extreme fear brought about by adequate provocation,’ ” he said, quoting the Maine Criminal Code, “is an affirmative defense to a prosecution.”

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