When a Baltimore homicide detective stops at a convenience store and five minutes later walks out to find a dead man sprawled across the hood of her car, she assumes he's been shot. The reasonable assumption is the worst one she's ever made in her ten-year career as a cop. In the next twenty four hours, Meg Stanton's carefully constructed identity as a cop and a mother threatens to fall apart because the victim is a broken link in a brutal, inhuman control scheme. And she has no idea she is its key element.

When a Minneapolis Police Department detective Max Renford walks up to a young girl sitting at the police station, the last thing he expects is to confront haunting memories of a childhood tragedy. The young woman, Gina Adams, confesses that she's being stalked and describes her stalker - a middle-aged woman dressed in 50s clothing and wearing an apron.

A more thorough check of the girl's history reveals that she is the only survivor of a mass murder that left her totally alone as a twelve-year old child. The state placed her in institutionalized care. For years she was forcibly fed powerful psychiatric drug cocktails. It could be the source of her delusions. However, she is the only one who appears to have the power to help Max purge an old tragedy. Such freedom is not without price. A serial killer is terrorizing Minneapolis, and there is a definite link between the killer and the girl's stalker.

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Waiting for her abusive husband to finish with his latest mistress, Kate overhears his plans to sabotage one of the company's joint projects with the Navy. Terrified, she grabs her six-year old and flees the ranch. She plans are to drive to Mexico, but decides to go through Arizona. Of course, being in Arizona brings back old and happy memories. She should stop and get some sleep, but pushes on and ends up crashing into a tree. When she comes to, she finds herself on a winery owned by none other than Ryan Cooper - her first husband and her child's father she believed was dead.