A hermit dies in the hospital of a bullet he received twenty years earlier. At his mountaintop home, a skelteton with a bullet hole and a metal knee is found buried in the yard. But Joe Gunther is not alone on the case. He's picked up a shadowy presence as eager as he is to unmask the person who buried the skeleton with the metal knee.
A frightened old woman kills a man at her door in the middle of the night and Detective Joe Gunther discovers they were co-jurors on a sensational murder trial three years earlier.
In Vermont, Lieutenant Joe Gunther seeks the rapist of his girlfriend, who was attacked shortly after Gunther left her bed.