A woman who recently had a miscarriage takes a baby left in the front seat of a car. She intends to raise the child as her own and her husband can't talk her out of it. The husband, desperate for money, decides to seek ransom from the father, a newspaper publisher. Erskine and Colby, after their investigation gets underway, learn of an additional complication. There is an outbreak of the plague in the city where the kidnapping has taken place. The kidnapped child has been infected.
—Bill Koenig