On a sunny morning in an affluent Los Angeles suburb, four young mothers drop their children off at Campbell's Daycare. A worker was making a bottle of milk when a man he shot her and took the babies. The mothers return but only to fined out the babies are gone. Until a phone call, a package, and a chilling letter. With help from friends and neighbors the police are sent racing into San Gabriel Mountains.

In the package lying at the dark center of the box, was a babies severed finger. The letter had come in the morning's mail, a common white drugstore variety envelope with a single sheet of lined tablet paper. The contents of it was no more then a roughly scratched out message. But it was a nightmare from which Susan couldn't awaken. "Your kid's alive. Do nothing till I tell you...