"It was the afternoon before the night when Miranda got killed. And later I wondered if something in the day, maybe some little detail, had anything to do with it..."

So begins the story of how one night's gruesome violence conceals a darker intent, perversity and deeper cruelty winding out of a past that no one wants revealed.

Milo Fyrish is the super in his apartment building, where he lives in aimless ease, more concerned with booze, carpentry and his cat than with his future. His friends and some of his enemies pass him off as a naïve fool. He has a loving and witty girlfriend, but secretly Milo is infatuated with Miranda, a mercurial high fashion model who lives on the top floor.

One night, after a drunken fight and a trip to the ER, Milo is late for his tryst with Miranda. He finds her on the floor of her apartment, tied up and dead. He feels delirium coming on. Before passing out, he tells his girlfriend to call the police, but then something else gets in the way....