When Catherine Ducane disappears in New Orleans, the cops react fast, she is the governor's daughter, after all. But the case quickly grows strange. Her bodyguard turns up horribly mutilated, and when the kidnapper calls, he doesn't want money: he wants time alone with a minor government functionary. Dragged down to the deep South from the New York district attorney's office, Ray Hartmann puzzles over why he has been summoned and why the mysterious kidnapper, an elderly Cuban named Ernesto Perez, wants to tell him his life story. But by the time the pieces fall into place, it's already too late.