Then he heard the unmistakable sound of the lock being turned on the door.

“Dad?” he called out. “Are you there?”

He set the files down on the desk and turned toward the door. Gripping the handle, he saw that it was indeed locked.

“Dad? Hey! I’m in here! Did you lock the door?”

But then he remembered his father was in the Hamptons. “Mom?” he called out instead. But his mother was at their townhouse in the city. She’d been spending more and more time there ever since Dad had hired Melissa. “Melissa?” Ryan called out. But he assumed Melissa was with his father in the Hamptons. As far as Ryan knew, only he and Chelsea were in the house. The servants had all gone home.

“Well, clearly not all of them,” he said under his breath. Obviously someone had come back and, finding the door to the study unlocked, thought he or she was doing the right thing by locking it. Ryan began to pound on the door. “Hey! Who’s out there? Consuela? Maria? Max? Carlos?”

But there was no answer. The house was eerily silent.

Ryan banged harder, shouting at the top of his lungs. “Hey! Somebody! Open this door!”

But still nothing.

“Jesus Fucking H. Christ,” he growled. He turned away from the door, glancing over at the windows. He’d have to crawl out through the window. It wasn’t a very high drop; he’d be fine. It was just a frigging nuisance. And very undignified to have to crawl out a window of his own house. Whoever locked that door was going to have his or her ass fired. How irresponsible to lock a room without first checking to see if anyone was inside.

Ryan was barefoot, wearing just a pair of jeans and a sweatshirt. He worried that he might cut his feet on the gravel outside the window. Plus there were rosebushes. Crawling out of the window meant he’d land in a thicket of thorns. There was no way around it. He groaned. He was really going to fire somebody!

“Hello?” he called one more time over his shoulder. “Anyone hear me?”

Chelsea, he was sure, was sound asleep again. He knew how zonked out she could be when she had a hangover. There was no choice but the window.

Except that it wouldn’t budge.

“Jesus Fucking H. Christ!” he shouted again. He tried the second window. Same thing.

Had Dad permanently sealed these windows closed? Was it an antitheft thing? He knew Dad kept important papers in the study. But he had a fucking wall safe. Why would he seal off windows?

They were just stuck. That had to be it. Ryan tried again. Once more, the windows wouldn’t move.

Ryan Young was not a patient man. In college, one of his girlfriends, a smartass psychology major, had said he suffered from “LFT”-low frustration tolerance. Ever since he was a kid, Ryan had always expected to get what he wanted exactly when he wanted-and ninety-nine times out of a hundred he did. But when things didn’t go his way, he got pissed. Instantly. And completely.

“Get me out of this room!” he screamed at the top of his lungs. He picked up a vase and hurled it. It smashed against the door into hundreds of shards of glass.

Maybe that would bring someone running.

But it didn’t. The house retained its eerie calm.

Which only infuriated Ryan more.

As a kid, he used to throw temper tantrums. Mom always gave in and let him have the candy bar or the extra bottle of Coke after he started screaming and kicking. Sometimes he still threw tantrums. At the office, if his assistants didn’t do everything they were supposed to do, or had failed to call a client or move stocks or trade shares, Ryan was known to rip them new assholes right in front of everybody. Often he threw things, like he’d just hurled that vase. Once he threw an assistant’s iPhone out the window when it rang while he was speaking. It smashed the glass and dropped twenty-three floors to land on top of a parked cab on Wall Street. Good thing it hadn’t hit someone in the head.

But as much as Ryan wanted to pitch a hissy fit, wanted to throw a few more things and break them against the door, he sensed this time a tantrum would do him no good. If he was going to break anything, it would have to be the glass in one of the windows. Then he’d have to crawl out, risking getting cut on the broken glass and rosebushes. This was just too terrible for words.

It was, however, about to get more terrible.

Ryan heard a sound. He turned. He heard it again. He spun around.

It sounded as if someone was in the room with him, though he could plainly see he was alone.

But then he heard it again. Footsteps. Not from above. Not from outside the room. But within the very room.

His father’s study was large but very open. The desk was set near the windows, surrounded by wooden cabinets. The other half of the room contained two comfortable chairs positioned in front of a fireplace. There were no closets, no alcoves. If someone were in the room with him, Ryan would have been able to see them. There was nowhere for someone to hide.

The sound this time came from behind him. Spinning around once more, Ryan saw no one there.

But it had sounded as if someone had just walked up behind him!

“What the fuck?” he whispered to himself.

Now there was another sound. Metal. It sounded like metal being tapped against the tiles of the floor. Someone walking around the room, banging something made of metal. Not heavy metal. The sound almost had a musical tone to it. There was reverberation in the air. If Ryan strained his ears, he could still hear it.

“What the fuck is going on?” he whispered again, and for the first time, he felt a little flicker of fear.

He would break the window. It was the only way. He picked up a heavy marble paperweight from his father’s desk and aimed it at the glass. But even as he did so, he heard the sound again. A footstep. The tapping of metal against tile.

He glanced around quickly.

And this time he saw it.

A man. A man in dirty overalls and a straggly beard. And in his hand he held an enormous pitchfork, its sharp tines scraping against the floor.

“Who the fuck are you?” Ryan screamed.

The man stood there, gazing at him with eyes so dark that they seemed dead. There was no emotion in the man’s face. Only dumb, brute power.

“How did you get in here?” Ryan demanded.

It was amazing how many thoughts could rush in to fill his mind in so short a time. A new landscaper. That’s who it must be. Someone Dad hired. A big old dumbass. Blundered into the house.

Or maybe not so dumb. Maybe he was trying to rob the place…

But why would he be carrying a pitchfork? There were no haystacks on the property…

“Who are you?” Ryan asked again.

The man seemed jolted into movement by his words. He took a step toward Ryan.

Ryan drew his arm back and let the paperweight in his hands go flying across the room. He watched as the heavy object struck the brute in the forehead. It bounced off easily, leaving no mark, drawing no blood. The man didn’t even blink, didn’t even seem to notice. He just kept walking toward Ryan.

“Stay back!” Ryan shrilled.

Now the man lifted the pitchfork.

He means to kill me, Ryan thought. He is going to stick that thing right through me!

He leapt behind his father’s desk just as the pitchfork came crashing down, piercing the wall behind him instead. There was a second’s delay as the man extracted the prongs out of the plaster, just enough time for Ryan to yank open his father’s bottom desk drawer and remove the pistol he knew he kept inside. He stood, holding it toward the man, his hands shaking terribly.

“Come any closer and you are a dead man,” Ryan said.

The words didn’t faze the maniac. He just aimed his pitchfork at Ryan and resumed his approach. Ryan fired.

He saw the bullets hit the man. He saw them tear the fabric of his stained old overalls. He fired three shots. Each one tore through the man’s chest. But once again there was no blood. Once again there was no stopping the man.