A dying former FBI agent is forced to confront her own mortality when she is tasked with hunting a serial killer who poses his victims to look alive and kills them without leaving a clear cause of death.

SYNOPSIS:

When twelve-year-old Debbie Rhodes is abducted from outside her home, FBI agent Melanie Fuller is called upon to find the girl and her captor. But the kidnapper, nor the girl are ever found.

Twenty-one years later Fuller is dying of cancer and, having seen the worst of humanity, she is content with her fate. All she lives for is watching the man that murdered her own sister rot in prison. But he isn’t rotting. He lives and thrives in his cell, while Fuller rots in a cell of her own making.

When Kurt Ressler, the rookie first responder back in 1988, now a seasoned detective, tells Fuller “there’s been another one”, she reluctantly agrees to write a profile on the perpetrator.

With little evidence to go on, Fuller and Ressler are forced to wait for him to abduct another girl. They do not have to wait long. But conflict arises when it becomes clear that Fuller’s priority is finding the man that eluded her, while Ressler is committed to rescuing the latest victim.

After the girl is found dead with her face painted in makeup and posed to look alive the case takes an even darker turn. And when new evidence suggests the killer is burying his victims alive, Fuller vows to spend what little remains of her own life hunting him.

The investigation leads to a known convict, but their hopes soon die when they find out their main suspect died in prison years earlier. No longer able to cope with the grim realities of pursuing a child murderer, Ressler quits. Fuller is now forced to work alone even as she herself inches towards death.

When another girl is taken and has only 24 hours left to live, Fuller turns to an unlikely source – her sister’s killer. Their unusual dynamic forces Fuller to question her own existence and comes to the realisation that hers is an illusion of life – much like that created by the killer’s posing of his victims.

Fuller concludes that the killer is attempting to recreate the first victim from 1988 in his own image and therefore must have known her personally. And when a dangerous schizophrenic confesses to kidnapping the most recent girl and threatens to kill her, Fuller’s insists that this is a plea for attention from an innocent man. But she is ignored by local law enforcement.

The schizophrenic man takes his own life, leaving the police with no clue as to the victim’s location. But Fuller remains convinced the real culprit is still at large. But Fuller is only a civilian. She steals an FBI badge and follows her instincts to where it all started; to Debbie Rhodes and the sweet little boy next door who had a crush on Debbie; Billy.

Convinced that the now adult Billy, a respected business man, is responsible for the latest abduction, Fuller races to uncover where he keeps his victims as they slowly asphyxiate. She discovers that he owns a Spring Water company. The kind with wells. The kind of wells you could bury a little girl in. But just as she is about to share her discovery with the Sheriff, she collapses, close to death herself.

From her hospital bed, Fuller continues to fight to save the life of the missing school girl. With new evidence, she convinces Ressler to return.

As Fuller lies on her deathbed Ressler returns to the case and arrives at the well in time to kill Billy before he kills the girl. He then makes it to Fuller’s bedside just in time to let her know that her dying moments were not in vain.

DEAD ALIVE