With our eyes locked, and my own heartbeat loud in my ears, I only barely registered the thudding footsteps climbing the hill to my left. “Step away from him and put your hands up,” barked a female voice over the rustling wind.
I turned and watched as a tall, black woman in a trench coat scaled the path, holding a gun in both hands. Her unbuttoned coat whipped out behind her, snapping in the wind. I let go of the knife, and Kimball fell to both knees, one of them cracking loudly on a flagstone. I raised both hands and took a step backward. I watched the woman’s eyes scour Kimball as she kept moving forward. She registered the knife protruding from his ribs and began moving faster, reaching Kimball and swinging the gun one-handed in my direction. “Get the fuck on the ground. Right now. Face the fuck down.” I could practically hear the adrenaline coursing through her as she spoke, and I did as she said, stretching out along the cold hard ground of the cemetery. I had no intention of fighting, or running away. I had been caught.
“Just lie there, and don’t move, Hen. Leave the knife where it is, okay?” The woman’s voice, talking to Kimball, was low and purring. I turned my head so I could just make out the scene, the woman rapidly punching numbers into her cell phone, the gun still pointed in my direction. She called 911, requesting an ambulance to “some fucking cemetery in Concord Center. It’s on a hill.” She identified herself as Detective Roberta James of the Boston Police Department and told the dispatcher that there was an officer down. She ended the call, checked briefly on Detective Kimball—“This doesn’t look so bad, Hen, just lie still”—then turned to face me. I heard a whiskering sound as she whipped her cloth belt out of the loops on her coat. She planted a knee in the center of my back and leaned all her weight on it. I felt the cold tip of her gun pressed against my neck. “Don’t give me a fucking reason,” she said. “Hands behind your back.”
I did as she said, and, with one hand, she tightly and expertly knotted her cloth belt around the wrists of my hands. “You move at all, and I’ll shoot you in the head,” she said. I relaxed my body. The wind blew a crumpled leaf against my cheek. I closed my eyes, and thought, with disbelief and horror, how my life was over. I could hear the female detective’s low voice humming to Kimball. He said something back, but I couldn’t make out the words. Now that I’d been caught there was no reason for me to want him to die. In fact, I hoped he’d live, and thought he probably would. I hadn’t pushed the knife all the way in. In the distance I heard the approaching siren of an ambulance. I listened as the woman detective told Kimball that he was going to be all right, that he was going to live. I opened my eyes. A strand of my hair was obscuring my vision, but I could partially see the tableau before me: Detective Kimball laid out in front of Elizabeth Minot’s grave, the woman over him, her hand pressed against his side to slow the bleeding. The sky darkened to the color of slate, and the faint, flashing lights of the ambulance were just beginning to illuminate the scene.
Twenty-four hours later my bail was denied at the Middlesex County Courthouse.
“We’ll try again,” my state-appointed lawyer said. Her name was Stephanie Flynn, and she was about twenty-five years old. She was small-featured and pretty but her fingernails were bitten down to the quick, and she looked like she hadn’t had a good night’s sleep in years.
She came back with me to my holding cell. “They’ll grant a bail review, and they won’t be able to hold you. Not with these circumstances.”
“It’s okay,” I said. “You did your best. I do realize I stabbed a police officer.”
“A police officer who was harassing and following you,” Stephanie said, staring intently at me through her stylish glasses. “He’s in the clear, now, by the way,” she continued. “Just got moved out of ICU.”
“That’s good,” I said.