Joe Erickson returns to a small Iowa town to settle his father's estate and finds himself drawn into a local murder investigation. A detective on medical leave from the Chicago Police Department, he is recovering from acute stress disorder brought on by the strain he experienced apprehending a notorious serial killer. He is supposed to be taking it easy, but his curiosity is aroused when he hears two teenage girls from neighboring towns have been kidnapped, murdered, and found posed nude along a riverbank. Local authorities fear they may have a serial killer on their hands. Being a small rural force, they need all the help they can get, and when a former lover and criminal profiler is brought in to consult, she talks Joe into joining the investigation as a special deputy to advise in the investigation.
But Joe is not the type to sit back and advise. In a test of his mental fitness, he throws himself into the manhunt and begins pursuing leads on his own. An arrest is made based on circumstantial evidence, but Joe’s intuition tells him the suspect is not the perpetrator, despite what the sheriff believes. When Joe's neighbors' teenage daughter is abducted in the same manner as the other two girls, he is stunned. She had become his jogging partner each morning, and he has come to know her family. The investigation has now become personal, and his hunt for the killer kicks into high gear as he must find her in the next three days, or she will become another corpse on the riverbank.