A man has been chained inside a tunnel and then dismembered and scattered along the railroad tracks. This is the beginning of Detective Inspector Joe Faraday's most gruesome case yet. But is it a bizarre suicide, or the cruelest of murders? Checking the list of missing persons as the police attempt to identify the body, Detective Constable Winter comes across a missing man, someone who stepped out of their ordered life with no hint of leaving. He is not the man in the tunnel; he has simply disappeared, and the only person Winter can find who knew him works in the city morgue. These two very different policeman—one awkward and by the book, the other brash and walking the thinnest of lines—must solve two perplexing unsolved crimes.