While tracking an elusive serial killer of young girls across several states, Murray Schmitz, a detective with Kern County Police, decides to take a break to pursue another elusive man, Alex Carreras. Murray hasn’t seen or heard from Alex since he saved her from a crate of leaking jet fuel six months ago. She pretends to play the tourist in the coastal California town where he has set up a law practice, planning to just casually bump into him. But her plan goes south as she instead bumps into a seedy-looking gentleman, Morton Stafford Allen III, at the door of Carreras’ law office. No less than the son of the once famous movie star Dede Jensen, self-effacing Mort is down on his luck through drinking, drugs, and gambling for which he’s been cut out of his mother’s will. He has hired Alex as his attorney to keep him out of jail for the umpteenth time. Instead, Carreras checks him into a rehab center at the judge’s orders, but Mort, true to his name, turns up hanging from a ceiling fan the next morning.
The night before, Murray bemused by the reunion with Alex, while driving home through the dark canyons, encounters a driver of a white van with road rage issues. She doesn’t connect the incident with the serial killer until Ron Jones tells her another girl has turned up dead. That makes three in three months in the same area. Murray's role is bait for the killer and she nearly ends up as one of his victims.