As NCIS: New Orleans Season 1 Episode 7 opens, a Navy officer driving a car is pursued by another vehicle. The officer is forced off the road, straight into some rebar that fatally impales him.

The NCIS team investigates the scene, initially assuming that it is a case of road rage. They find a silver locket in the car, purchased the night before and apparently empty. They also discover that the victim, Commander Darby Wilson of the Office of Naval Research, was barefoot.

Agents Pride and LaSalle go to Wilson's house and find a second body in the upstairs bathtub. She is identified as Wilson's assistant at ONR, Rebecca Ortega. A neighbor tells the team that Wilson and his wife Catherine argued a lot and that Rebecca shared a lot of late nights at Wilson's house and was possibly having an affair with him. The team theorizes that Catherine Wilson hired a hitman to take out CDR Wilson and his apparent lover, as Catherine had withdrawn $20,000 from her account two days prior.

Catherine denies having anything to do with the murder, but acknowledges that they were getting divorced.

LaSalle and Brody talk to Wilson's commanding officer, who reveals that Wilson was a liaison with a tech company called Axelrod Industries, with which they had some issues. A lieutenant in the office reveals that Wilson was not having an affair with Rebecca because Rebecca was a lesbian.

Sebastian leads Loretta to find a microchip bio-tracker device in Wilson's stomach. Someone was spying on him.

Pride speaks with the people at Axelrod Industries, which develops cutting-edge technologies. They deny any knowledge of what happened to Wilson and Rebecca.

The team learns that Wilson's computer system had been wiped, but Agent Plame works hard to recover what he can. They find out that Wilson secretly met with someone the night before he was killed.

Pride goes to Catherine's house to ask if she knows who Wilson was meeting with. He discovers the vehicle that ran Wilson's car off the road, parked outside Catherine's house. He interrupts an attempted kidnapping, but the masked assailant escapes. She tells them that Wilson was going to meet a man named Shang. Catherine is moved to a safehouse.

"Shang" is Shang Lee, an ex-employee of Axelrod who was fired for selling blueprints. He is found dead soon after, though he was apparently killed hours before Wilson and Rebecca.

At the safehouse, the unknown attacker attempts to kill Catherine, but she is saved by Pride. Pride then figures out that Wilson had concealed information in the silver locket he had purchased for Catherine.

Brody and LaSalle find an SD card hidden in the locket's clasp and learn that Axelrod was attempting to cover up the failure of their new high-tech missile system. The guilty parties are then arrested.