Mysteries.  Everyone loves a good mystery, right?  Yeah - except for the poor saps trying to solve them and right now I have more than my fair share on my hands.

Top of the list were the terrorists and their dirty bomb.  So - the terrorists ‘spontaneously combusted' or may have been victims of a freak electrical discharge of a voltage high enough to run Amtrak.  Whatever, their bones and ashes (and in one unfortunate case, just a head) were found in a remote warehouse near Forco, south of Scarsdale.  My personal guess they were hit by a flamethrower or something but whatever, it's no longer my problem - that case has gone back to Baton Rouge.  Only problem is we found the truck, the accelerant and the explosives.  All we're still missing is the scary bit - one radium generator.  How that was removed and where it is now - yeah, still a mystery.  Maybe it's with Omar.

He's Mystery No.2.  One of the terrorists met with this ‘player' the night before getting crispy fried.  Drives a black Merc - the same type of car seen hightailing it out of Forco just before we found our dead extremists.  So, he's prime suspect with the barbecue except it seems he has no second name, no connection to either of our local OC gangs and wears an ankh.  That's as much as we know.

Mystery 3 - Lurleen Dumont - One of six known to the NOPD, a 26 year old hooker from Alabama, fished from the Ponchatrain a few months ago, minus her epidermis layer.  One of 3 skinned bodies found over the past 3 years, the others being a student and a History professor, both from Tulane University.  Now, this is pretty normal except we have a witness who swears blind that Lurleen was walking around, complete with her skin at the Dixie Cup Bar and Grill three nights ago.  She got into an altercation with our Russian terrorist (Gennady Urenko - he of the unmarked head) resulting in a knife fight that put ex-boxer and Stenneau man Mark Sorbonne in intensive care.  Two nights later he's meeting with Omar for a brief uneasy pow wow.  Lucky break for us as it was CCTV that led us to Urenko's lair but no sign of Dumont or Omar otherwise and NOPD have dental records from the original body that make her dead beyond doubt.

Mystery 4 - This one's a doozy.  So a new week dawns and first thing team members are called into JD Himself.  A request from the hot shots in NYC to take care of a worried father and material witness in an ongoing OC investigation.  His name is Stephen Locke and his daughter Tabitha was meant to catch a flight to the Big Apple last Friday.  As it happened, she was a no show, so of course he believes she's been kidnapped. He has a cow, his handlers have a cow and then we all have a cow when her picture comes across the wire.  Martikian, our man in the NCIS says he saw her image in a house in Las Vegas, Greene's been painting her picture on his wall and I have been seeing her in my dreams. 

I am beginning to wonder if that Yellow Sign is driving us all mad like the Priest said.  Somewhere there's a doorway in which she stands - I can see the building in my mind, as clear as day.  Where the hell is it?  Where the hell is it?  Too many unanswered questions from phantoms of truth whispering in the dark...