At the height of his career Dr. Philip Tate of Boston, a psychiatrist with a compulsion for breaking into houses, picks the lock of a friend's home and is seduced by the friend's drunk wife. So begins the downward slide of a man who had everything.

John and Brooke are on their own, hitchhiking from town to town as they hunt the last of the Withered through the Midwest - but the Withered are hunting them back, and the FBI is close behind. With each new town, each new truck stop, each new highway, they get closer to a vicious killer who defies every principle of profiling and prediction John knows how to use. Meanwhile, Brooke's fractured psyche flips in and out of lucidity, manifesting new names...