He doesn’t care where to mete out justice—an autumn woods rotting in slush, or bustling city streets with a million women’s faces! He hunts. But he isn’t just a criminal driven only by his own burning passion. His victims are the upper part of a huge iceberg of an indifferent machine that is harvesting blood. At the request of an old friend, Lieutenant Colonel Malinin, an investigator for especially important cases, reviews the case of women disappearing around Nikolsk. He sees a connection, but all he has from the evidence are guesses—he needs real facts to form an investigative team for this case. And while Malinin searches for them from his office, terrible events unfold in Nikolsk.