The 1979 murder of a schoolteacher who was stabbed to death in a wooded area is reopened when the victim's bloodstained jacket is found stuffed in a tree trunk with a happy-face key chain in a pocket. The case was originally investigated by Jeffries when he was a rookie detective. The probe reveals the victim died two months after attending a key party she left with a neighbor, a man with whom she had an affair.

A homely 33-year-old woman is gunned down in an alley in 1989 and her unsolved murder is reinvestigated when a tape of the victim, made for a dating service, turns up in a suicide victim's apartment. Apparently, it was what the man was watching when he killed himself. The probe reveals the man was a con artist who dated lonely women in order to rob them of their life savings. Also, Vera moves into an apartment of his own.