Rio de Janeiro police investigator Galvão is pursuing two trails, one professional and one personal. While he tracks a serial killer of taxi drivers, he also seeks his estranged daughter, Sandra, whom he had thrown out of the family home when she adopted a promiscuous teenage lifestyle. Lives intersect when the serial killer, Toninho, a young man of unsavoury connections, befriends Sandra, now an exotic dancer and prostitute living and working in the seamy underside of late 1970s Rio. Theirs is an unstable relationship, built on unmet emotional need, lived in the shadow of her father's pursuit.