Meredith Carlyle is living an unhappy, lonely life as an EMT in the city of Seattle. During a campus shooting, she breaks the rules and helps save a life by going way outside of her scope of practice. Disgraced, she is left without a job or an identity to call her own. That night, she literally stumbles over the body of a headless teenager left by the shore of the Montlake Shipping Canal. Meredith is plunged into the world of forensic investigation and police procedure, finding herself stuck between good cops and bad. She is faced with the decision to find this skeleton's identity or to save her own life.