A time traveling serial killer is hunted by the girl who got away from him. Kirby is a young woman whose promising life was derailed by a brutal knife attack in 1989 that nearly killed her. She was so badly injured some of the papers mistakenly reported her as dead. She only survived because her dog lunged at the killer and he lost his knife while stabbing the dog. A few years later, in 1993 her killer has still not been caught, and when the police case goes cold she decides to investigate for herself. She takes a job as an intern at the Chicago Sun-Times under the reporter that wrote about her attack, Dan Velazquez.
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Dan is now a sports reporter, burned out on the crime stories. At first he tries to convince her to let it go. But she spends a year pursuing the case on the side and he slowly comes around, partly because he believes she is onto something and partly out of growing affection. Kirby's theory is that the attack was not random but that is was the work of a serial killer active for several decades in the Chicago area.
Meanwhile we see a different point of view, that of sociopathic drifter with a long history of violence. In 1931 he stumbles across a strange key that he can sense is something special. He follows his instincts and finds himself in front of a house in a run down neighborhood. It is borded up and shabby, but when he uses the key the door opens into what seems like a different house altogether; fully furnished and new. He feels the pull of the house calling him and goes upstairs to find a strange room with a wall full of shimmering objects each attached to a girl name. He removes one of the objects and is confused to see that it is now both in his hand and on the wall. When he looks out the window he is shocked to see time flickering past at an astonishing rate, looping. He soon figures out that with the key, depending on the object and his frame of mind, he can step out of the front door anywhere between 1929 and 1993. He also understands that the each of the objects belongs to a woman he must kill, someone full of potential.
In 1993, Kirby investigates all the knife murders of women in the last two decades and finds several with odd similarities. The attack patterns are strange, though, not following the usual escalation patters of a serial killer. But at several of the scenes she notices that an out-of-place object was present, something relatives didn't recognize as belonging to the victims; a toy, a lighter, a baseball card, etc. However her investigation also brings up some unexplainable discrepancies like a baseball card from 1951 on a 1943 victim.
Harper Curtis settles into a pattern of traveling to visit a victim as a little girl and giving her one of the objects from the wall, promising to come back for it. He then uses the house to revisit the same girl a decade or so later, killing her and leaving a different object. He visits Kirby in 1976 and gives her a pink My Little Pony. He also gets a thrill from visiting soon after the murder to read the papers and see the aftermath.
After a new murder happens in 1993 Kirby makes the mistake of visiting the victim's mother, who complains to the paper causing her to be suspended. Desperate and sure that she is near solving the puzzle, Kirby goes home to her own mother. While home she finds an old photograph of her holding the pony and suddenly remembers the day the strange man gave it to her. She digs through her old toys and finds the pony, stunned to see it has a 1985 patent date stamped on it.
Meanwhile, Harper Curtis is reading a 1993 paper an sees an article by Kirby in the Sun-Times, meaning she didn't die in 1989 like he thought. He knows he has to kill her and goes to the newspaper's offices under a pretense, but she is out.
Kirby has gone to Dan with the new information about the toy with the odd date on it. He's skeptical about it but agrees it could be a clue. He agrees to help her continue the investigation and together they go to the newspaper to look up the toy company in order to figure out the date discrepancy, hoping it might be a sample or prototype and rare enough to connect to an employee of the toy company. While they're there someone tells Kirby that a man was just in looking for her and when they describe him Kirby recognizes it's her attacker.
Kirby runs off to pursue him, and Dan follows on her heels but loses her. Kirby manages to get a glimpse of Harper and follows him to the house. She sneaks in, the pony in her pocket serving as a key that allows her to see it for its real self. She sees the wall of names and trophies, and the weird flickering out the windows and realizes what it means. She escapes and calls the cops but when they go to the house the interior looks abandoned to them.
Unwilling to let him get away Kirby convinces Dan to break into the house with her, he agrees and brings a gun. Once inside they confront Harper who almost escapes to 1929 while struggling with Dan. He stabs Dan severely and rushes back inside only to find Kirby (who has had plenty of time to make her next move) with the objects from the upstairs room in a gasoline doused pile, holding lit match. Kirby drops the match and then unloads the entire clip into Harper, killing him.
Best part of story, including ending:
It's a very scary premise, a serial killer with access to time travel and clever enough to use it to both kill his victims and extend his enjoyment of the chase and aftermath.
Best scene in story:
All the scenes between Dan and Kirby are pretty good, but the best is when he takes her to her first ballgame to report on it and she gets really into it despite herself.
Opinion about the main character:
Kirby is a realistic portrayal of someone severely traumatized by violence but who still manages to be a complete human being with a personality, a sense of humor, and a very firm sense of who she is and what she needs to do (in this case catch the guy, and take no nonsense from anyone about her past).
