The daughter of a local official was found murdered in a small Altai town. After examining the case, investigators assume that this crime is connected with a number of other unsolved murders. Could this episode be the work of the infamous Barnaul maniac? The tangle of mysteries is being unraveled by Belova, a local opera house, and Terekhov, an investigator from Barnaul. Clues and guesses lead them to a mysterious savage girl who grew up in the taiga.