Gloria Starks is a struggling actress who has just landed her big break in the Santa Barbara play Dazzle and Stretch when she is found dead in her garage. She was asphyxiated in her car through carbon monoxide poisoning and the SBPD's first instinct is to rule it the fourth suicide in a short time, but Shawn is convinced she and the others were murdered. He wonders aloud why someone like Gloria would listen to the heavy metal the radio was set to before pointing out the pantsuit in the backseat and asking why someone who is about to commit suicide would swing by the dry cleaner's first. Lassiter explains that any number of people could have changed the radio station and that the pantsuit could have been picked up long before the fatal day.
This turns out to be true, but by then new developments have taken place that make the murder angle worth checking out. All victims had called the same 1800 stress line several times, and when Lassiter recognizes stress counsellor Rory Derkins' face as someone he has arrested before he goes over there pronto to arrest him again. He believes that Rory is a no-good metalhead who just loves to kill and claims that his eyeliner pencil is the same one that was used to scrawl Gloria's suicide note on her windshield. He is wrong on both counts yet still takes Rory away, but luckily Shawn soon figures out that the real killer is in fact Wes Hiltonbock, a telephone repairman listening in to the stress line's conversations while working outside the building. He was devastated when his brother Bill took his own life and vowed to take revenge by killing other 'weak' people like him, with Gloria being his third and last victim before his incarceration.