Swimming sensation Wendy Rollins’ Olympic dreams crumble when she suffers an emotional breakdown at the Olympic trials. Turning to love for a cure, she finds only heartbreak. The twin tragedies push her deeper inside her troubled world.

Tony Romero bumps into her at a supermarket and sees the beauty behind her gloomy exterior. After a fast and furious romance, he proposes. Wendy accepts. The past is forgotten.

Driving home after a day at the beach, Tony spots a gaudy, golden hood ornament in his rear view mirror. Fear grips him as he realizes that he and Wendy are being followed by the same car that was seen the night his father and brothers were murdered. The couple escape after a thrilling chase.

Tony vanishes from Wendy’s life for a week. He reappears, wearing a strange black outfit. He tells Wendy his story. He is the surviving son of a Northern crime syndicate boss. His family has lost the battle for a slice of Miami’s billion dollar drug business. The Latins were too strong. Although Tony wasn’t part of his family’s crime interests, the Latins fear his revenge.

“They want to close the book on your family,” the homicide detective told him after his father and brothers were slain. “You’re the last page.”

Tony must now go into hiding in order to survive. For Wendy’s safety, he tells her the romance has to end. Wendy, on the verge of another emotional breakdown, refuses to let him leave. She begs Tony to take her with him, promising that she will break off all contact with her friends and family. He reluctantly agrees.

Wendy delays their departure and visits a doctor. When Tony confronts her, she announces that she’s pregnant. Tony is elated, but warns her that it’s now even more critical that they get out of town.

The couple steal away late at night in a pounding, tropical rain. Just outside the city limits, a tractor trailer truck jackknifes across a deserted intersection. The golden hood ornament appears. Tony leaps out of his car and is immediately gunned down. Wendy sprawls over Tony’s bleeding body, protecting him long enough for a policeman and the truck driver to run over. The assassins flee.

The next scenes are a blur. The policeman and trucker convince Wendy to release Tony. She does, then feels a searing pain rip though her body. She loses the child.

Wendy spends the next two months at Tony’s bedside trying to will him out of his coma. When his eyes finally open, Wendy checks him out of the hospital and stashes him in a secluded house.

Tony recovers, but his personality changes. Formerly passive and nonviolent, he becomes vicious and vengeful. In his bullet-scarred mind, he plans, then carries out a series of gruesome murders, lashing out in bizarre ways at the Latin assassins and their offspring.

Wendy is devastated by each new act of Tony’s revenge. She starts going to confession to ease her conscious, but stops short of telling her priest, Father Shea, about Tony. She drops enough hints, however, to torment the priest over what he should do. Father Shea torn between the private sanctity of the confessional and his overall responsibility to the community. Added to Father Shea’s dilemma is the fact that he knows a terrifying truth that has escaped even Wendy.

Tony continues killing, always dressed in the same black outfit. He leaves little figurines and quotations at the murder scenes that warn of the horrors to come. The figurines are taken from a baby mobile hanging over an empty crib in his hideout. While some of the victims depicted by the toys are obvious, others are totally mystifying. Even more baffling, the more mysterious his choice of victims become, the more Wendy accepts the murders.

With each new death, Father Shea becomes increasingly distressed over what to do. An attempt to warn the police backfires, leading them to view him as a possible suspect.

As the emotional, religious, and legal entanglements tighten like a vice around Father Shea’s head, the priest reacts by following Wendy to her hideout. He becomes paralyzed with fear when he overhears her talking to Tony. He does nothing, unable to deal with what’s happening in the dim room. His fear and inaction allows another murder to take place.

The following night Wendy returns to the hideout and brings Tony his laundered clothes. Suddenly, from out of the shadows, Father Shea appears. Wendy screams in fright. Father Shea notices that she, not Tony, is wearing the black outfit.

“It’s not his fault,” Wendy cries. “He’s doing it for me. Forgive him.”

“It’s not whose fault, Wendy?” Father Shea demands. “Tony? Tony is dead. He’s not here. He’s never been here.”

Wendy refuses to accept what Father Shea tells her. She loses control, then faints. Father Shea looks around the room and sees not only the unmistakable evidence of Wendy’s revenge, but the shocking signs of her personal perversion. Distraught, he kneels in a corner to pray for her soul.

Wendy’s eyes pop open. She hears Tony’s voice.

“We have to kill him Wendy. He’ll make me go away forever.”

Wendy takes a gun and edges toward the priest. Just before she fires, her bare left hand knocks her gloved right hand away. The bang sends her mind reeling into a flashback of all the events as they actually happened, starting with the night of the shooting when Tony was actually killed, and continuing through all the revenge murders that she, not Tony, committed.

Wendy is placed in a mental hospital where she becomes an model patient. Her doctors, believing that she’s recovered, discharge her after a year. Their initial diagnosis of her insanity has freed her from any legal punishment.

Following her release, Wendy encounters a rattled Father Shea in a department store. After some strained conversation, she slips away before he can discover what she is buying – a black shirt, pants, cap and shoes.

At another empty house, a different crib has been equipped with a brand new baby mobile. In the center of the mobile is a truck, the last remaining figure from the previous mobile. Surrounding it are figures of children. Dark-haired children. Latin children.