Within the FBI, there exists a division dedicated to investigating and prosecuting criminals on the internet. Welcome to the front lines of the war on cybercrime, where Special Agent Jennifer Marsh (Diane Lane) has seen it all... ...until now. A tech-savvy internet predator is displaying his graphic murders on his own website -- and the fate of each of his tormented captives is left in the hands of the public: the more hits his site gets, the faster his victims die. When this game of cat and mouse becomes personal, Marsh and her team must race against the clock to track down this technical mastermind who is virtually untraceable.
FBI Special Agent Jennifer Marsh (Diane Lane) works hard to maintain a delicate balance between her life as a single mother and her job as a law enforcement officer. Each night, she trolls the Internet with her partner Griffin Dowd (Colin Hanks), cracking down on credit card fraud and sexual predators from the bureau’s Portland, Oregon field office. When they receive a tip regarding a creepy new website, the partners begin to monitor killwithme.com in an effort to determine its authenticity.
At first the site seems too outrageous to be real. The creator has stranded a kitten on a sticky rat trap and is calling on his viewers to spread the word as the cat slowly dies on camera. An intense internet search reveals an intricate web of servers and hosts that make the website virtually untraceable, but reveals that the killer is taunting the agents with clues that all point to Portland.
When a local man is kidnapped and takes the kitten’s place, an even more frightening scenario unfolds: An online readout indicates how many users are logged on--the more people who visit the site, the sooner the man will die. Unable to stop more and more visitors from clicking on the site, the agents must watch in horror as the counter reaches the fatal number.
Marsh is drafted to investigate the case as part of a multi-agency task force with Portland Police Detective Eric Box (Billy Burke). As the killer’s crimes escalate and Marsh turns her considerable talents to finding him, she grows increasingly distracted from her family, unaware of a looming threat to her loved ones. As the task force gets closer to their quarry, the killer tightens an invisible noose that draws Marsh’s FBI partner into his deadly scenario. With time running out, Marsh and Box begin to untangle the intricate web of clues and interconnections, but the solution may come too late.
