Thy Killer's Keeper

John Salton is everything that a country police can expect of its agent. He has brilliant analytical intellect, is honest, dedicated, resilient, adaptive and with a perfect psychological profile for an FBI agent. John Salton is also good at hiding things. When his boss sends him to Eureka to investigate a bizarre hit-and-run, he is really pushing him to be a better father. Salton’s eight-year old autistic son has just been accepted into a new remedial program at an experimental medical facility upstate California. Eureka’s Sheriff Hinckle has no idea what he’s dealing with when he finds a body of a hit-and-run victim in a ditch, wrapped in so much duct tape it looks like a mummy. He knows he’s in over his head and asks the San Francisco FBI for assistance.

For six years, Salton has managed to hide the fact that he’s still unable to handle his horrendous family past, namely that his artist-wife has poured a can of paint thinner over herself and stuck a lit acetylene torch into her two year old son’s hand. A tiny spark did the rest. To cope with the tragedy, Salton constructed for himself a survival theory. His wife did not commit suicide. She was murdered by proxy – an off-site killer who somehow took control of his son. The Eureka duct-tape murder carries the same MO.

However, Ruby Tam, Salton’s partner, is not hampered by sensitivity and tells him he’s plain crazy to think that there’s a sinister connection between the “duct-tape” victim, a string of unsolved historical murders, his wife’s suicide and his son’s autism. The two agents head upstate and as they begin to review the historical unsolved murders, Salton’s analysis leads to a bone-chilling conclusion that the current hit-and-run, his wife’s “suicide” and a string of historical unsolved murders could indeed be the work of his “theoretical” proxy-killer and that this sinister presence is somehow connected to the upstate medical facility– and his son.