A camouflage-clad serial killer has begun quietly targeting the members of the school's majorette squad, disguising his violence as an attempt to “save their souls” before they reach adulthood. Among the earliest victims is Nicole Hendricks, a pregnant teenager, who is attacked and murdered alongside Tommy Harvack. Her body is later found on the shore of a creek, setting a tense tone for the investigation. At the same time, detective Roland Martell finds his personal and professional lines blurred as he carries on an affair with Marie Morgan, a friend of Nicole, which adds emotional weight to the case.
The story broadens to Vicky McAllister's world, where she lives with a wealthy but ailing grandmother and her housekeeper, Helga Schuler. Unknown to Vicky, Harry Schuler, Helga’s son, spied on the majorette girls and helped poison the grandmother, while also enabling the murder of Vicky’s parents years earlier. Helga has rewritten the grandmother’s will to leave everything to herself and her son, but a crucial condition in the original will—kept intact in the forged revision—means that if Vicky dies before her eighteenth birthday, the fortune would pass to the state.
After another majorette, Barbara, is found murdered in her swimming pool, Roland grows convinced that water holds symbolic significance—a baptismal, cleansing motif that threads through the killings. Helga eventually uncovers the killer’s identity, the local Sheriff Braden, when Harry Schuler stumbles upon him killing another victim in the shower; the victim had managed to remove the killer’s hood before dying. The housekeeper and her son confront the sheriff at his house, revealing that he is a religiously fanatical killer who targets the majorette squad to keep them “pure” until they turn eighteen, so they can be deprived of sexuality and drugs while the wealth remains within reach.
They instruct the sheriff that he must kill Vicky once she turns eighteen so they can claim the entire family fortune. In the midst of the escalating danger, Vicky is abducted by a local biker gang intent on harming her, prompting her boyfriend Jeff Halloway to gather a large arsenal and stage a siege against the gang’s headquarters to rescue her. The chaos allows the sheriff to turn the tables on his blackmailers: he murders Helga and destroys photographic evidence of his guilt, then frames the now-dead Harry for the murders, leveraging Harry’s history as a peeping tom to seal the sheriff’s deception.
As time passes, the sheriff retreats to observe a grim final tableau: from a distance, he watches a coach train a fresh group of elementary school girls to become majorettes, a haunting echo of the cycle of control and secrecy that propelled the killings.
