When the pregnant wife and three year old step-daughter of fading movie star, Tom Travis, disappeared, a massive, fruitless, search was launched. Three months later the body of Travis's wife was discovered in a shallow grave only a few miles from where Tom had been riding his dune buggy on the day she vanished. Of the three year old little girl, Sarah, no trace was found.

Arrested and placed on trial for capital murder, Tom Travis is now only a days away from an almost certain guilty verdict. Desperate to find some way out, his lawyer hires suspended Ex-Deputy D.A., Steve Janson, to review the file and find some over-looked clue that might keep Travis off death row.

Janson, whose own wife had been murdered almost two years before, accepts the assignment, not to help Travis, but in the faint hope of finding Sarah still alive. Janson's investigation leads him on a twisted path from Travis's mistress to her drug-dealing brother to the writer and producer of his last movie and on across the landscape of Southern California until, eventually, Janson begins to wonder if Travis might really be innocent after all.