Gus Ward Harrison has been killing for years. Ever since he killed his cousin at age seventeen. He's an intelligent, good looking man who is well off financially, but his dark side does not allow for too much success. In his late forties, he lives alone in a large old farmhouse in southern California. Being divorced and with all this house available, he decides to bring a woman with four young children up from Mexico to live with him. His favorite of the children is young Deb, who looks up to him as her dad. Gus meets Gage Pann who is twenty years younger, through a mutual friend in San Francisco, and discovers that Gage has interests in Ciphers and Norse mythology, two of Gus's own interests. Gus also feels Gage has killer instincts and believes Gage could be of big help. So as their "friendship" grows, they soon develop a game of murder as they elude the law. When Gus dies of cancer, Gage continues on as Cryptic, with no one even coming close to solving the murders. That is, until forty years after the original murders.