Her best friend Mavis says that Charlie Fouts is missing. But the coed has recently broken up with her boyfriend. Earlier in the year, she quit the basketball team. So a simpler explanation of her absence is that she went off with a boyfriend for an unscheduled holiday or simply dropped out and went home. 

 

A search of her apartment reveals nothing out of the ordinary as far as Deputy Richard Carter is concerned. Mavis, however, shows that Charlie failed to take the emergency cash she kept, and that she failed to bring her goldfish and antique doll to Mavis for safe keeping.

 

Investigating, Richard discovers that Charlie went out for her morning jog one day. The next day no one saw her. He begins interviewing her friends and then canvasses her jogging route.

 

Charlie is being kept in the dark—literally. She is in a sparsely furnished room, her only communication with the person she terms "The Freak," and he only communicates via TV monitor and keyboard as he regiments her life.

 

Neither Richard nor Charlie have a clue as to where she is or who has abducted her. Each of them begins a painstaking reconstruction of the day she disappeared.  Richard has only his persistence. Charlie is armed only with sports cliches and her native intelligence and resilience.

 

What does "The Freak" want? That's easy. He wants . . .