The maid, maybe, but Tessa wasn’t sure Eddie had a maid. In any case, she wasn’t going to take any chances. La Canada residents were snooty and into their privacy. This house was no exception. Heavily wooded and a bit secluded, she could scream until the cows came home and no one would hear. At home in Glendale-only a few minutes from here, but a world away as far as neighborhoods went-she’d have grabbed her trusty baseball bat and the phone to call the police.

No baseball bat here, and at first glance around the fancy place, she couldn’t even find a telephone. But she’d seen plenty of horror flicks in her twenty-six years, and had no intention of being the stupid chick. She’d just get out of the house and then call the police.

The front door seemed extremely far away so she whirled to the sliding glass door behind her instead. But she stopped short when she remembered she’d left her keys on the foyer floor with her purse. She needed those keys for an escape.

And then came another thump.

Spooked, she started running toward the foyer. Track had been her least-favorite sport, but she managed to move like lightning. Funny what fear did for motivation. Ten-thousand square feet was suddenly far too much space, and she felt grateful for her perpetual poverty and six-hundred square feet of closed-in apartment that would have only taken a blink of an eye to run through-

“Excuse me.”

The male voice sounded so polite, coming from behind her, that she actually stopped short and looked over her shoulder.

And faced a man carrying a DVD player. He looked to be twenty-something, and wore jeans and a grungy white thermal shirt on his large, beefy body. With a grimace, he set down the DVD player and straightened. “Another visitor. Terrific.” He cracked his knuckles and suddenly looked exceptionally big and menacing. He gestured with a jerk of his chin toward the back of the house. “Okay, sweetcakes, let’s go.”