“Let’s not make this any harder than it has to be,” he said.
Her face hurt so badly that she was barely able to hold back the tears, but she didn’t want Basque to know how much it hurt, so she forced herself to. She still had the purse in her hand and swung it at him, but he easily stopped her arm.
She memorized the license plate number as he yanked her toward the vehicle. She struggled to get away, but he was oppressively strong and tossed her into the back of the squad and slammed the door, almost taking off her foot as he did.
She knew there wouldn’t be a door handle on the inside of a police car, but instinctively, she went for one. Of course it wasn’t there.
Basque took his place behind the wheel and turned toward her, his shoulder-length hair flipping to the side as he did. “Hello, Tessa.”
She spit in his face through the wire mesh cage separating them. One of her eyes was already swelling shut from where he’d punched her. Her face hurt, it really, really hurt, but she willed herself not to cry.
He drew two fingers across the spittle, then brought them to his mouth, closed his eyes, and slowly licked her spit from his fingers. A few of his teeth were visible. His cheek was stitched up from where Patrick had stabbed him. His teeth were shattered and sharp and uneven and it sent a chill coursing through her.
Then he faced the front and leaned his head back against the mesh so that he could see her in the rearview mirror. Strands of his hair wavered back through the metal divider, but unfortunately not long enough ones for her to grab hold of or tug.
“We have a long night ahead of us, Tessa.” To her, it seemed as if each word was a worm dropping from his mouth. “I’m feeling a little adventurous. You never know what the next few hours may have in store.”
Then the man who’d abducted and killed more than twenty-five women started the car and left the school with his next victim locked up tight in the backseat.
82
Tessa still hadn’t answered her text and when I tried to locate her phone’s GPS, nothing came up.
I peeled away from the marina, called Ralph, and told him what was going on.
“Where are you heading?”
“Tessa’s school. I need to find her.”
“I’m gonna have the ambulance driver take me to my house, make sure Brin and Lien-hua are alright. Call me when you find Tessa.”
“I will.”
This was bad.
Very bad.
She was trapped in the back of a cop car driven by a serial killer who wanted to punish her father. By eating her.
She definitely needed to get out before they got to wherever he was taking her.
But how do you escape from the back of a locked police car?
The doors only open from the outside, there was no way she could get through the wire cage to the front seat. The windows were almost certainly reinforced, and what was she going to do anyway, kick her way out with her sneakers?
But one thing played to her advantage: Basque had been in such a hurry to get her in the car that he hadn’t taken her clutch purse from her.
He’d knocked her phone away, yes, but she still had Aiden’s cell in the purse.
Tessa didn’t really think of herself as having very many skills, but she had one: texting without looking down at a phone.
Fishing Aiden’s phone from the purse, she shielded it with her hand to cut down the brightness, then silenced the volume. She stared at Basque coldly in the rearview mirror so he wouldn’t suspect her of trying anything. Then she let her thumbs find their way across the keypad to contact her dad.
I was about five minutes from the school when I got the text from an unknown number: He’s got me. Help me, Patrick! Track this phone.
Terror shot through me.
A moment later another text came through as she messaged me that she was in an FBI Police car, and she sent me the license plate number.
That’s my girl.
I put a trace on the phone and almost immediately found out it belonged to Aiden Ryeson. Though we still got nothing on the car we were able to get a lock on the phone’s GPS location. They were traveling south along the GW Parkway paralleling the Potomac River.
I whipped the car around, did a U-turn through a stream of oncoming traffic, and blazed toward them.
Tessa wanted to look down at her phone so badly, but she didn’t dare do it for fear that Basque would notice and get suspicious.
It was possible Patrick wasn’t checking his texts or that he wouldn’t be able to trace the phone.
Texting him might not be enough.
She definitely needed to think of a way to get out of this car.
I tore down the parkway. I hated high-speed chases, but this was one time I wasn’t going to back off the gas at all.
I didn’t know if Basque might somehow get to the phone that Tessa had, but since she was texting me I had to assume that she was in the back of the FBI Police car, and that, at least for the moment, Basque would almost certainly be driving, so I used my phone’s voice-to-text function to get her the message that I was on my way.
If the GPS on Aiden’s phone was accurate, I was about a mile behind them.
Tessa emptied her purse on her lap and felt through the items to see if there was anything she could use to get free.
Some lip gloss and makeup, her cigarettes, the spritzer bottle of perfume Brineesha had given her, her driver’s license, her lighter, a few crumpled dollar bills.
Not much, but two of the items she could use.
Oh, yes.
Her lighter.
And the perfume.
Earlier in the week she’d promised Patrick that she wouldn’t set anyone on fire with coffee creamer.
But she hadn’t promised she wouldn’t use something else.
83
Tessa finally looked down.
In the dim light she couldn’t make out all the words on the tiny label on the back of the perfume bottle, but she could read the first two words, the ones that mattered most: “Caution: Flammable.”
According to the GPS location of the phone we were tracking, I was less than a quarter mile back.
I swerved around a minivan. Sped toward her.
My car started to drift but I wrestled it back under control as I edged past a hundred on the speedometer.
This was where it happened or it didn’t happen.
The flame might just singe his hair, she wasn’t sure, but it was the only thing she could think of doing at the moment.
She leaned close to the cage.
“You told me we have a long night together?”
Just as she’d hoped, he pressed his head back against the wire mesh to get the angle right to look at her in the rearview mirror.
“Yes.”
“Well, I think one of us is gonna have a longer night than the other one.”
Raising her hands and holding the lighter in front of the perfume bottle, she simultaneously sprayed the perfume as she flicked on the lighter.
It worked even better than she imagined.
Basque’s hair went up in flames. The entire back of his head was engulfed and the fire spread quickly to the front. Maybe he had some kind of product in his hair, some sort of gel or spray that was flammable — she had no idea, but whatever the reason, it had worked.
She didn’t stop spraying.
Basque was crying out and slapping furiously at his head with one hand while trying to maneuver the car with the other.
She popped off the top of the perfume bottle and flung the remainder of the fluid through the mesh onto the fire and it roared hotter.