Scorpion by John T. Cullen - a screenplay in the tradition of "Hannibal" and "High Tension" - a darkly glistening, disturbing police procedural.

Act I: Opens with growing dread, as an all-American FAMILY at dinner while a bizarre STALKER upstairs begins a ritual of playing with the children's stuffed animals, dancing with the parent's clothing to old rock tunes, and getting weapons ready. The killer descends the stairs and wipes out the family. We cut to a rainstorm on a lonely country road in the U.S., where a lone driver (ISMAIL, a mercenary and assassin) with a gun under the seat and a dice keychain is looking for...something or someone. He is pursued by haunting, horrible memories of war. He arrives at a diner frequented by Albanian Kossovars and inquires about a DR. NIKOLIC. Ismail winds up rescuing the drunk and unconscious Nikolic from the middle of a street, and tells Nikolic, in his office, he needs some clothing tested for DNA. He is after Colonel Drac, a horrific war criminal from the Balkan Wars of the 1990s. Nikolic agrees to help, but phones the FBI after Ismail leaves. Meanwhile, on the Hudson River in New York City, we a HOUSE OF EVIL that will become a recurring icon in the film. Meanwhile, back in our unnamed heartland town, a REALTOR is showing the empty family home. The family, she tells her prospects, simply skipped town because of gambling debts, and abandoned their home and mortgage.

Act II: POLICE have found a set of dead BODIES in river, weighted down with chains. Three principal INVESTIGATORS converge as the wet, slimy corpses are laid side by side onthe muddy river bank with their rusting chains. At this dismal, foggy scene, we meet CHARLES LEBEAU, a washed up cop and insurance investigator ("I shot the right guy at the wrong moment, so they dumped me out the back window"); hard-hitting and fast-thinking DETECTIVE ARLENE BRUNO of the local P.D.; and FBI SPECIAL AGENT JOHN GRITZ, an expert on serial killers. Meanwhile, an attractive, irresistible young woman named KAY MARTIN, wearing a sharply tailored business suit, enters the office of banker BRAD KEENE and begins the seduction process that will lead to the brutal and violent slaying, and disappearance of Keene and his wife and children. Ismail is the first in the film to actually encounter SCORPION (the serial killer) and pays with his life; his body gets dumped in the woods where Scorpion has a lair. At the same time, Brad's WIFE SUSAN KEENE starts being seduced by a handsome, charming young man named TIM BRADOVIC, who gets her involved in an ecological project at her grade school (attended by her children). Meanwhile, the three police types—LeBeau, Bruno, and Gritz—each begin their own interweaving threads of investigation, haunted by their own ghosts, and pursuing shadows.

Act III: The threads spun by LeBeau, Bruno, and Gritz start to converge as LeBeau makes a startling discovery about yet another family that vanished. Gritz starts working long-distance, by phone, with police in New York City, who are starting to unravel the horrific secrets of Colonel Drac's bleak and evil house on the Hudson—where child sex slaves from the Bosnian wars were kept, until one or two of them turned the tables on their tormentors. The FBI begins unraveling a chain of missing families reports, and rivers in a tri-state area begin relinquishing the chained, moss-wet skeletonsgroups of missing families. The serial killer, Scorpion—or is it two serial killers, a man and a woman?—prepares to wipe out the Keene family in a bloodbath. In the end, only Detective Bruno is left standing to tackle the elusive and single-minded lunatic who strikes over and over again with calm precision, then white-hot explosive violence, and quickly returns to the studied and chess-like mode of making murder victims appear to have walked away of their own accord into night and fog. The clock pounds out every second like a steel hammer, as Arlene Bruno runs down the Keene's street, with her gun drawn, alone, hoping to reach the house and the killer before Susan Keene and her children arrive.