Suddenly she heard another sound, a mechanical one. Instinctively she looked up, but raindrops drenched her face. She almost lost her balance and fell again. The sound intensified. A rhythmic thwacking sound came from the sky behind the dense cloud cover. She recognized the noise. It was a helicopter.

“Help, help!” Christine screamed. She straightened up as she ran, waving her bloodied hands. She prayed the helicopter could see her cutting a swath through the cornfield. It sounded closer and closer, a mechanical thumping.

She glanced up, blinking rain from her eyes. The helicopter popped through the cloud cover, its big rotors turning. It was flying low and coming toward her. She waved her hands as she ran. It got closer, and she felt the turbulence from its rotors. Bugs and birds flew everywhere. The helicopter was the corporate green of Chesterbrook Hospital. It was a medevac.

Christine screamed for help, waving her hands in the turbulence. She was going to be rescued. Help was here. She didn’t have to die here, not now, not today. She looked up again only to see the helicopter fly past her.

“No, no, help!” she screamed, running and running. The helicopter choppered to the gravel road. It must have been for Joan. Christine was on her own. She almost cried out with despair. No one was coming for her. She had to save herself and her baby. She didn’t know if Dom was behind her, but he wasn’t shouting anymore. He must’ve realized that he had to stay quiet and low or the helicopter would see him.

Her chest heaved, her lungs burned. She was almost out of breath. She didn’t know if she could go another step, but she kept running, hacking away at the cornstalks, powering herself forward.

Suddenly she heard the faint sound of a police siren cutting through the rain. The police were on their way, coming toward her, but too far away. She had to keep going. Behind her she could hear the crackling getting closer, less than six feet, then five. Dom was closing the gap between them. He could reach out and grab her. He could kill her and get away.

The rushing sound of the traffic got louder and louder. She heard the honk of a car horn. She heard the louder rumbling of truck tires churning on the wet asphalt.

Christine screamed for her life, running and fighting her way through the corn. The rushing of traffic got closer and closer. She caught glimpses of the cars on the road through the stalks.

Suddenly she popped out of the cornfield, staggering to stay upright, her momentum carrying her forward into the road, where cars were rushing back and forth. She screamed as a pickup almost sideswiped her, skidding, but righted itself as she kept running across the road. She reached the other side, just as she heard a sickening thud.

“No!” Christine whirled around from the other side, just in time to see Dom struck by the massive chrome grille of a tractor-trailer that carried him forward before he vanished beneath its chassis.

Christine collapsed to her knees, in a flood of tears and rain. It could have been her, but it wasn’t. She was alive.

And so was her baby.

Chapter Fifty-two

Christine experienced the next few hours as if they were a blur, after being collected at the scene by the Chester County Police, who arrived in force, taking statements from drivers who had witnessed what had happened, rerouting traffic around Route 842, establishing a perimeter with flares and yellow tape, and erecting a blue tent with screens around Dom’s body, until the coroner came. Christine was taken to the hospital in an ambulance, sirens blaring, and she felt a sort of mute shock as she lay strapped into a gurney, while the EMT took her vital signs and phoned them in ahead.

Christine kept all of her emotions at bay, whisked to the emergency department at Chesterbrook Hospital, where she’d parked only hours before and caused the scene with Grant Hallstead. She never would’ve guessed that it would end with the gruesome death of Dom Gagliardi and the attack on Joan Hallstead, who was already in the OR. Dom had cut Joan’s throat and left her for dead, but amazingly, she’d been able to reach her phone to call 911 in time. The hospital hadn’t hesitated to send a medevac for the wife of one of its most prominent surgeons, and the word was that Joan had lost a lot of blood but was expected to recover.

Christine had been wheeled into the ER, changed out of her sopping wet clothes and into a hospital gown, then she’d been given a heated blanket and a saline-drip IV. Her cuts had been examined, irrigated, and covered with Neosporin. She’d asked the nurses to call Griff and Marcus, who was on his way. She figured he wouldn’t arrive until the middle of the night, and she didn’t want to think about how he had reacted to the news.

They checked her and the baby and both were given a clean bill of health. She got her discharge papers, but not before the nurses replaced her hospital gown with a fresh set of scrubs, as a parting gift. Scrubs were color-coded at Chesterbrook Hospital—navy scrubs were for nurses, maroon for radiologists, and teal for OR nurses—and Christine felt honored to don the navy scrubs that only nurses like Gail Robinbrecht were entitled to wear. But she tried not to think about that either, keeping tears inside.

Christine had been allowed to remain in the examining room to give a statement to the Chester County detectives, rather than go to the station house, and she waited for the detectives, muting the flat-screen TV in the corner, when CNN started running a video of the rainy scene on Route 842, above the banner, BREAKING NEWS—NURSE MURDERER DEAD IN TRUCK COLLISION. She glanced at the screen and flashed on her good-bye party, when she had first seen the video of Zachary’s arrest. She knew she should feel happy that he would go free, but she kept even that emotion at a distance.

The first detective to enter the examining room was the one who had taken her through the crime scene, Detective Stuart Wallace, in his black logo polo shirt and khaki slacks. “Remember me?” Detective Wallace asked gently, crossing to the foot of her bed, his smile warmer.

“Yes, of course.” Christine smiled back, though her face hurt from the cuts and scratches, as if her skin were too tight.

“How are you feeling?”

“Okay, good.” Christine didn’t elaborate. The truth was, she was trying not to feel.

“Griff says hi. He’s out in the waiting room. He’s been here since just a few minutes after you got here.”

“Really?” Christine asked, touched.

“He called 911 on your behalf, even before Mrs. Hallstead did. He asked us to send a squad car after you to make sure you were okay. He asked us to look for you, just past Unionville.”