Pizza with extra sausage, anyone? Neptune's delivery boys have been plagued by a thief this week--a mugger with a taste for pineapple, extra cheese, and wallets. After the fifth mugging, I was approached by Ryan-Who-Haunted-the-Olivereses--apparently there's not much money in tormenting the grieving parents of a dead kid, so he's working at Cho's Pizza. He was also mugged, but he wasn't worried about the Extra Large with Mushrooms and Shrimp that was stolen. He had something far more valuable (and, we can assume, probably tastier) in his wallet--a list of students who participate in his online message board, Pirate's SHIP. Unfortunately for these pirates, they weren't just chatting about physics homework. They were talking about being gay. Gay, but not out.

Whoever had the list was using it to pry open the closet door and stick a money-grubbing fist in: Marlena, a pep squadder with a crush on Madison Sinclair, was outed in from whole school, and then Kylie Marker asked for help after she'd been blackmailed for five thousand dollars. Acting on a hunch, I told Kylie to respond to the email and we'd try to sting the blackmailer but it didn't work. Kylie tried a tack of her own: interviewing pizza mugging victim Kelly Kuzio on the school news school. Kuzio claims the mugger stole his six thousand dollar rims. In a twist, Kylie ends her broadcast by outing herself and revealing the identity of her lesbian girlfriend: Marlena Nichols.

Ryan gave me a list of the names and numbers of people who'd allegedly ordered pizzas when the deliverers were mugged--real people, bogus orders--and I approached some of the people on the list to find out what they knew about the muggings. Answer: not much. But I was able to set up an ambush, with Corny's help, at the next scheduled pizza mugging. Our culprit? A skinny little PCHer-wannabe named Arturo. Pizza mugger, yes. Blackmailer, no.

So who's threatening those on board the Pirate SHIP? I followed another hunch: how a single mugger was able to knock Kelly Kuzio out long enough to steal his rims, but not put him in the hospital. Kelly couldn't answer that. And he final 'fessed up: the rims hadn't been stolen at all he'd had to sell them in order to pay off the blackmailer. Kelly had a secret worth paying to protect: he was a member of the Pirate SHIP crew. Kelly Kuzio is gay.

With Kelly's help, we planted a tracking device in a bundle of money and delivered it to the address the blackmailer conveniently provided in the demand. Then we followed it. And got a huge shock. The blackmailer? None other than Kylie Marker, who'd come up with a creative way to raise money for a permanent graduation trip out of Neptune.

After hiring Dad to help him prove he didn't cause the bus crash, Terrence Cook started coming unglued. At first, he couldn't remember what he was doing the day of the crash, and he knew it would be easy to finger him without an alibi. But then he recalled being at the Seven Rivers Casino that day, and security camera footage from the night of the crash backs him up, although there is a gap in the tape during the time when the crash occurred. But since Dad found out that cell phone signals are jammed in the casino, there's no way Terrence could have made the call that detonated the explosives and blew up the bus. Good news? Not so much the casino tapes might show that Terrence wasn't killing school kids, but they also show him in a casino gambling on baseball. Say it ain't so, Terrence. Terrence's unlikely savior? Lamb. Dad handed him the tape of himself blackmailing Terrence. If Terrence's story comes out, so does Lamb's. Uh-oh.

For a brief moment in time, it looked like Terrence was cleared of being a killer, even if he wouldn't be on the podium when they handed out the ethics awards. But then Jackie and I borrowed a car from his fleet so we could go watch Wallace's basketball game, and when we went to un-stick the convertible top, we made an unsettling discovery in the trunk: plastic explosives.