Why is Rachel running from Napolitano into the arms of Sydney Pizer, the coke-snorting sybarite behind her stepfather's murder? "We needed some explicit perversion here," says this week's contributor, Mitch Paradise. "At least that’s how I saw it."

Napolitano has not yet had to face the deep, abiding shame arising from his gross malfeasance in office. But it's coming, baby. That’s just the way it’s going to have to be.

Napolitano's quest to save his friend Celeste and salvage his own reputation next proceeds to a Korean Karaoke club and a late-night heart-to-heart with the sllnky femme fatale who seems to know more than she's saying about her mother's disappearance.

One minute, Russell Napolitano is L.A.'s powerful mayor on a mission, the next he's stumbling around barefoot, his political career in shambles, his very life at risk. What happened?

In Mayor Napolitano, we have a larger-than-life hero, whom we care about because of the deep loss he feels when his friend Larry is murdered. So why did he sleep with Larry's wife?

Elizabeth Cosin came up with Celeste's kidnaping a couple of weeks ago and might never have thought about our project again, but she felt bad leaving readers hanging about Celeste's fate. Ah, guilt. It's a wonderful thing.

Obviously, the map has significance beyond the depiction of the city's buried methane pockets, and it's something important enough to have gotten Susan Harmon killed.