Art Donovan's mother is dying, but he is having trouble accepting this as fact. His relations with everyone in the newsroom suffer as his mother gets worse, and his colleagues try to help him come to terms with the inevitable.

While investigating a string of fires in the same neighborhood, Lou and Billie find a connection linking a building owner and members of a fire department to arson.

A mother, obsessed with tracking the hit-and-run driver who killed her son, arouses Rossi's fighting instincts and leads to a human interest story with an unexpected payoff. Meanwhile, after Lou and Mrs. Pynchon have separate encounters with hostile citizens, Billie is assigned to find out if there's a story in the use of cars as weapons.