A flashflood in northern New Mexico washes out the body of a woman who had been missing for eight years and presumed murdered by a Mexican cartel. Now, the evidence begins to point to the husband, Josh Blagsdale, a respected professor at the local university. Suspicion is compounded by the fact that the police are going to disinter the body of the professor's former live-in girl friend who had apparently committed suicide in his garage a few years before. As his life begins to unravel, the professor commits suicide rather than succumb to the approbation of his family and peers.
Ironically, at the time of Rosa Blagsdale's disappearance, Ted Thompson, a young man about to graduate from high school also went missing and had never been found. When the professor's suicide made the local headlines, Nora Thompson, the mother of the missing boy, is worried that her vague suspicions about the professor might go unresolved. Her husband, Joe Thompson follows a lead from the newspaper and contacts Sue Wilson on the off-chance that she might have some clue to finding their son. The local sheriff and the boy's father examine a remote area where Sue's divorced husband, Paul Wilson, and Professor Blagsdale sometimes camped.
In the end it is the professor's two daughters and son who pay the steepest price of their father's misdeeds. As John Blagsdale cleans out his father's office, further evidence of the hidden motives are revealed. The son begins to wonders if the hubris his father exhibited might, after all, be an inherited trait.