Sheltered but precocious Robbie Segal has run away from home, a small brick house on an unexceptional street. Her desperate mother has asked Harry Stoner to find her. What begins as an ordinary missing-persons case, a case that should be settled without any violence at all, suddenly changes in an impossibly terrifying way.

Now Harry is on the trail of a shockingly brutal act of murder, because it might lead him to a runaway girl, because it had become part of the job, because something deep and indelible inside him simply has to.