“Detective Alvarez,” she corrected when she picked up. “Susan? Is everything okay?”
“You need to come over,” I said. “And you need to bring an evidence bag. A big one.”
The precinct had changed since the investigation, but the interrogation room felt exactly the same as it did on TV—cold, sterile, and smelling of stale coffee.
Alvarez sat across from us. The rabbit and the drugs sat between us. She hadn’t spoken for five minutes. She just stared at the items, her face draining of color. She looked older than she had in the newspaper photos from the trial. The weight of the cases she carried was etched deep around her eyes.
“The glass,” she whispered finally, almost to herself. “In the second statement Emily gave, she mentioned ‘bottles clinking’ before the screaming started. We all assumed it was beer bottles. Derek was an alcoholic. It fit the narrative.”
“They weren’t just drinking,” I said, my voice trembling with a rage I hadn’t allowed myself to feel until now. “They were dealing. Or Derek was. And Kyle.”
Alvarez nodded slowly, the pieces of a puzzle she thought she had solved rearranging themselves into a horrifying new picture. She opened a file folder, her eyes scanning the old reports.
“We ran background on Kyle, of course,” she said. “Low-level possession charges. Nothing like this. And Derek… Derek was drowning in debt. We thought it was gambling or bad loans. But looking at his bank statements now… the cash withdrawals… the erratic behavior…”
She looked up at me, and I saw the realization hit her at the exact same moment it had hit me.
“The fight,” Alvarez said. “Derek said, ‘She always knew how to push my buttons.’ He wasn’t talking about nagging. He was talking about the stash.”
“Melissa,” I said, saying her name for the first time in that room. “She wasn’t just a victim of domestic violence. She was a barrier.”
We reconstructed the night in the cold air of that room.
Derek and Kyle were there to move the product or perhaps use it. Melissa, fed up, terrified for her daughter, or perhaps threatened by the danger they were bringing into her home, had intervened.
“The wetness,” Alvarez murmured, rubbing her temples. “Emily said the rabbit was wet. We logged it as spilled beer. It was in the report. ‘Item 4: Stuffed rabbit, damp, distinct odor of alcohol.’”
“It wasn’t just beer,” I said. “It was sweat. Or maybe she tried to wash it off. Or maybe…” I swallowed hard, the image forming in my mind. “Maybe Melissa was trying to flush the drugs. Maybe she had them in the sink. And when she couldn’t flush them in time, when she heard them coming for her down the hall, she did the only thing she could think of.”
Alvarez closed her eyes. “She gave it to Emily.”
The horror of it made me nauseous. Melissa knew she was trapped. She knew Derek was coming for the stash. In a desperate, final act of maternal protection, she didn’t just hide the child; she hid the reason for the violence.
“Go hide Mr. Rab, baby. Go hide him under the table and don’t make a sound.”
She used the rabbit as a decoy. She turned her daughter’s comfort object into a vault, knowing Derek wouldn’t look twice at a raggedy stuffed animal while he was tearing the house apart looking for his drugs.
“She saved Emily’s life,” Alvarez said softly. “If Derek had found those drugs… or if he had thought Emily knew where they were…”
“He would have killed her too,” I finished. “He killed his wife for it. He wouldn’t have hesitated with the child.”
The rabbit wasn’t wet from tears. It was wet because a terrified mother had snatched it from a puddle on the counter or the sink in her frantic haste to stuff the bags inside before the kitchen door burst open.
Emily hadn’t just called 911 to save her mother. She had called 911 clutching a kilo of narcotics. She sat under that table, listening to her mother die, holding the very thing that killed her.
The reopening of the case was quiet but brutal. We begged Alvarez to keep the media away, to keep Emily’s name out of it. “She’s just started to heal,” Tom pleaded. “Don’t let her be the ‘Drug Bunny Girl.’”
Alvarez was true to her word. The press got a sanitized version: New evidence discovered in Derek Miller case leads to additional charges. They didn’t mention the child. They didn’t mention the toy.
Confronted with the physical evidence, Kyle’s plea deal was revoked. He rolled on Derek completely this time, admitting that the fight started because Melissa had threatened to flush the “retirement fund.” He admitted that they had torn the house apart looking for it after she was dead, never thinking to look under the table where the child was hiding.
Derek, already serving life, had specific drug trafficking and distribution charges tacked on, ensuring he would never, ever breathe free air again, no matter what parole board he faced. The narrative changed from a “tragedy of passion” to a “cold-blooded execution over narcotics.”
But for me, the legalities were secondary.
I went home that night and looked at Emily. She was sleeping, her arm draped over the empty space where Mr. Rab usually lay. She looked so small in the big bed.
I realized then that I had been judging Melissa. All this time, I had thought of her as a woman who stayed too long, a woman who failed to protect her child from a violent home. But I was wrong.
Melissa was a warrior. In her final seconds, with death breaking down the door, she didn’t panic. She calculated. She identified the threat, neutralized it by hiding it, and secured her daughter. She died so the secret would die with her, hoping the police would find it, not the husband.
She just hadn’t counted on the police missing it.
I had to explain to Emily that Mr. Rab had to stay at the “police hospital” for a while because he was very important evidence. She cried, but she trusted me.
We bought her a new rabbit. A soft, white one. She named him Mr. Cloud. She liked him, but she didn’t love him. Not the way she loved Mr. Rab. Mr. Cloud didn’t smell like home. Mr. Cloud hadn’t been there.
Three months later, Detective Alvarez came to the house. She stood on my porch holding a brown paper bag, looking like she hadn’t slept in a week.
“The evidence locker is cleared,” she said, her voice raspy. “The drugs are destroyed. The case is closed. But… I thought she might want this back.”
