Detective Sammy Stone and his partner Will Getz arrive at the scene of the crime to find the gutted and scalped corpse of twenty-one year old Marci Levelle. This is the third gutting/scalping case in three nearby counties in Illinois in three months. Sammy and Will know they have a serial killer on their hands. When Sammy snaps at both Will and the forensic technician Laverne for no reason, Will suggests he take a short break to get his volatile, stressed to the limit temper under control. Sammy reluctantly agrees and meets his girlfriend Eve for drinks and dinner. Eve points out that Sammy does indeed seem overly stressed. After Eve pleads with tightlipped Sammy to tell her what’s wrong, he finally opens up and shares the gruesome details of the case he’s working on. He’s frustrated that there were no clues at the crime scene. He fears that the killer will strike again before he is stopped. After their conversation, Eve says she’s lost her appetite and asks Sammy to drive her home. He is certain his morbid talk upset her. Once they are in the car, he apologizes. Eve tells him she wasn’t upset by the subject matter of his conversation. She was upset over his secrecy. She had to pry every word out of him. She feels he doesn’t trust her. Taken aback, Sammy tells Eve that she is the secretive one, not him. After four months of dating, he knows almost nothing about her. She’s given him only tidbits of generic information, such as the fact that she likes the color blue, rock and roll, and long-haired cats. She is so mysterious about her past, he wonders if Eve Blue is even her real name. Sammy’s attitude pisses Eve off. Once they are at her house, she slams the front door in his face. The next day, Sammy calls Eve to apologize for his gruff behavior. She doesn’t answer. He tries to put their argument out of his mind and concentrate on the next step in is murder investigation, which is to talk to Marci’s contacts, to find out what kind of person she is and who’d want to hurt her. Sammy and Will find out from Marci’s coworker Jasmine at the boutique she worked at, that Marci was having a clandestine affair with a girl named Evangeline. Jasmine says that no one in the boutique has ever met Evangeline, but she heard Eve tell Evangeline on the phone that she would meet her at a bar called Alistar’s on Halloween. Will and Sammy both start to wonder if Evangeline had anything to do with Marci’s death. Sammy and Will head to Alistar’s in search of more clues. They show the bartender that was on duty on Halloween night Marci’s photo. He remembers Marci, and the girl she was with because she was exceptionally tall and her head to toe sequined burka won the costume contest. She also had striking violet eyes. He says they always take a picture of the contest winners. When he shows Will and Sammy a picture of Marci’s date, Sammy turns white. Even though her body is fully covered, he recognizes his girlfriend Eve by the initialed ring on her middle finger and her uniquely colored violet Liz Taylor eyes. Sammy can’t believe Eve is in any way involved in Marci’s murder. He decides to dig deeper into Eve’s past before he voices his suspicion to Will. He drives to Wisconsin and reaches out to Eve’s Aunt Laura, who raised Eve and her younger sister Susan after their mom died in a fire. He is told by Laura’s long term roommate Patricia Parker that Laura passed away after suffering a major stroke two weeks ago. Patricia tells him that she knows Laura’s nieces Eve and Susan well. He discovers that as a teenager, Eve’s budding career as a model was destroyed when she was attacked and partially scalped by a home intruder. After that, Eve’s personality changed from friendly and down to earth to moody and reclusive. Sammy believes that the attack left Eve unhinged and begins to accept her guilt in all three murders. He drives back to Chicago to confront Eve. Five minutes away from Eve’s house, he receives a call from Eve’s younger sister Susan. Susan sounds terrified and says that she’s found out something horrible about Eve. She starts to tell him what that was, but the phone goes dead. Sam rushes to Eve’s house, opens the unlocked door and finds Susan laying on the floor. He bends down to help her and lays his gun on the floor. She wraps her arms around his neck and he feels a sharp needle prick. He passes. When he wakes up, he is in Eve’s basement, tied to a chair like the other three scalping victims had been. Susan confesses that she’s the killer he’s been looking for. She’s framed Eve so that the case will be closed and she will be free to move on and kill again. Eve can’t dispute the matter because she killed her by putting a bottle of sleeping pills in the tea she gave her. Sammy will be Eve’s final victim. Susan has started to scalp Sammy when a still alive Eve shoots her in the back of the head. Eve tells Sammy she knew Susan had killed those girls because she’d found the scalps long before tonight. Eve said that she didn’t come forward because she loved Susan. Sammy is angry at Eve for staying silent, but he sympathizes with her because she’s been surrounded by death and sadness her entire life. He doesn’t want Eve to be tried as an accessory to murder after the fact. He tells Eve to let him explain what happened when his partner Will comes. When Will arrives, Sammy tells him that Susan is the killer. Susan had become emotionally unhinged when she was forced to watch her sister Eve being scalped by a home intruder. Susan killed the girls in a twisted, insane effort to avenge Eve. She tried to kill him because she was afraid he’d turn her in. Eve killed Susan to save his life. Eve had no knowledge about what Susan was doing. Will goes to visit Sammy in the hospital. He mentions that the case is officially closed, but that he feels there are some irregularities in Eve’s testimony. For example, why did Eve not drink the drugged tea that Susan made that night when she had drunk it every time before? And why did Eve, being a self-confessed clean freak, not smell the scalps, which stank to high heaven? In Will’s opinion, Eve knew how dangerous Susan was and she knew about the scalps before they were found. That made her an accessory to murder after the fact and meant she would have to serve a stiff prison sentence. Out of friendship for Sammy, Will doesn’t turn Eve in.