While visiting her friends Clark and Ginny Blanchard in Santa Barbara, Jessica uncovers some rather unpleasant facts when Ginny comes into the room with torn clothing after a fight with her husband. Naturally, Clark turns up dead and Ginny is suspected of murder. Jessica's social visit turns into another, very personal, case.
This episode includes examples of the following tropes:
- "Blackmail" Is Such an Ugly Word: Dane Kenderson visits Allison Franklin, asking her to convince her husband to back his bid for chairman of the board now that there's a vacancy. Allison points out that her husband might prefer to back himself and asks why she should interfere. When Dane threatens to tell her husband about her affair with Clark, she asks if he's blackmailing her; he prefers to phrase it as "protecting [his] interests."
- Bloody Handprint: Scott discovers something is amiss when he finds a bloody handprint on the white wall of the beach house. He then follows a trail of handprints to find the body.
- Business Trip Adultery: Implied; when Officer Stratton starts questioning him about the night of Clark's murder, Greg says that he was staying with a friend in San Francisco who can vouch for his whereabouts. The way he hesitates after saying "she" in the heat of the moment indicates he meant something other than a friend.
- Domestic Abuse: When Clark gets drunk, he lashes out at his wife. Ginny tries to cover it up, saying that she's embarrassed and it's probably her fault anyway, but Jessica naturally refuses to let it go.
- A Deadly Affair: Clark's mistress, Allison, came to his beach house for a tryst, only to find him drunk and angry. When he attacked her, she fought back with a fireplace poker, inflicting a lethal head wound.
- Foreshadowing: Early on, Scott makes a cryptic comment about how attending college close to home means he can visit frequently and keep an eye on things. It turns out he knew about Clark's abusiveness.
- Hoist by His Own Petard: When Ginny threatened to call the police, Clark ripped the phone out of the wall. Later, he and his mistress got into a fight, and she couldn't call an ambulance for him.
- I Can't Believe a Guy Like You Would Notice Me: Ginny tells Jessica about her and Clark's courtship. He was very charming and romantic, and she couldn't believe he was interested in her, or that she was falling in love again after her husband's death. Jessica assures her that any guy would have seen her as an amazing woman.
- Shipper on Deck: Ginny and Officer Stratton hatch a conspiracy for him to take Jessica to the airport, and Ginny tells Jessica that he hinted about taking this year's vacation on the east coast.
- Taking the Heat: Scott, Ginny's son, walks into the police station and confesses to the murder after the police go after his mother. Jessica correctly suspects that he's trying to protect her, and she also suspects that Ginny agreed to plead guilty out of fear that her protective son might have killed Clark.
