Celeste’s kidnapper, Omar, takes Napolitano to a tunnel under the Venice canals to show him Celeste is okay, but she’s not there!

This week’s winner, Arthur Tiersky, who picks up “Right of Way” from that point in his pages 51-55, says he followed a deductive reasoning process to help him whittle down the story’s many possible directions and focus on its most logical dramatic path.

“Things were either what they seemed to be (a guy named Omar, who knows Rachel, kidnapped Celeste for money) or things were not what they seemed to be (which the formidable novelist and screenwriter Jim Thompson once said was a condensed version of EVERY story, so already I’m more drawn to this).”

Artie, a Glendale-based writer currently working for the Disney Channel, took Thompson’s edict to heart, devising a back-story in his mind that cast Celeste as a mastermind of her own abduction.

Why? Well, he’s not saying, but he promises it all makes sense if you buy the premise: “Celeste wants to stage a kidnapping. Rachel knows this dude Omar who would be willing to ‘play’ the kidnapper... Calls are made, the plan is arranged, Napolitano falls for it, and it all goes right...

“Until something went wrong. Someone ACTUALLY wanted to kidnap Celeste, and the fake kidnapping made the real kidnapping that much easier to pull off. So this act of foolishness, whatever bizarre reasons were behind it, has serious consequences.

“This I like,” Arthur said. “Moreover, hapless innocent Omar is killed, and in such a way that ties this whole seemingly red herring back to our other plotlines. This I like too.”

Now the question is how can Napolitano, who has himself been abducted, knocked unconscious and left shoeless, get himself and our story back on track? The answer, in Arthur’s mind, was to track down Rachel by impersonating Omar on the phone.

“That Russ is able to accurately imitate Omar is not just a gimmick (though it was that), but it reflects Russ’s character, helps explain how he has had such success as a cop and politician. He listens and observes and is able to get in the mind of those around him. That’s what we want from our protagonist,” Arthur said.

Napolitano's quest to save his friend Celeste and, at this point, to avoid possible prosecution for royally screwing up a police investigation, next proceeds to a Korean Karaoke club and a pre-dawn heart-to-heart with the sllnky femme fatale who seems to know more than she's saying about her mother's disappearance.

“This plot is going to get only more convoluted, and it’s going to take a guy like this to stay one step ahead of it.”

Of course, Arthur’s thesis could be all wrong. Maybe Celeste didn’t engineer her own kidnapping. Maybe it was done by someone else entirely.

Artie would be the first to admit it: Things aren’t always what they seem.