Los Angeles police detective Peter Decker had grown very close to Rina Lazarus' young sons, as he had to their mother, and he looked forward to spending a day of his vacation camping with the boys. When one of the boys stumbles on two human skeletons, charred beyond recognition but identified by a forensic dentist as teenage girls, vacation time is over for Decker. The father of a teenage daughter himself, Decker throws himself into the murder case, both professionally and emotionally. His quest pulls him deep into the crack dens of Hollywood Boulevard and painfully close to the children of the streets and a nightmare world he must make his own.