It was exhilaration followed by agony. Detective Sergeant Peter Decker of the LAPD had just witnessed the birth of his healthy, strapping daughter only to see his wife, Rina, suddenly whisked away into the emergency room with complications from her long, hard labor. For a while, it was touch and go. But just as things start to calm down and Rina seems to be on the road to recovery, a different tragedy strikes.

Another family is thrown into an agony that only new parents can know - Baby Girl Rodriguez has been stolen from tbe hospital nursery. The family's ordeal is Peter's as well, because it is the very nursery where his daughter peacefully slept that same night. The head nurse, Marie Bellson, seems to be missing as well. Despite his exhaustion, Peter makes it his professional and personal mission to find Baby Girl Rodriguez and the nurse who allegedly stole her.

1. Bellson and the infant have vanished without a trace. Nobody in the hospital saw them leave, not even Decker's own grown daughter, Cindy, who was tending to her half sister that night. Everyone interviewed agrees that Marie Bellson was fanatically devoted to the welfare of the newborns and would sooner die than harm one. That reputation, and a suspicious bloodstain on the floor of the hospital garage, are all that remain of the night nurse. Until Bellson's car is found at the bottom of a cliff.

Chilled by the thought of a baby floating free in a dangerous world, Peter and his partner, Marge Dunn, drive themselves to untangle Bellson's murky past. What they find is a double life with roots in the radical sex and drug culture of the sixties, a tragically broken home, a male geriatric nurse with something to hide, and a mysterious lady bodybuilder who knows too much.

Torn between his own family's pressing needs and his obession with finding the missing infant, Decker refuses to let Baby Girl Rodriguez be chalked up as just another statistic. But the harder Decker works, the more he realizes time is running out...

1. Peter Decker of the LAPD and his beautiful, sharp-witted, Orthodox Jewish wife, Rina Lazarus, continue to be one of the most intriguing mystery couples around.