THE MEETING WITH WEBER was set for four that afternoon. Conklin and I briefed Jacobi, assigned our team, and set out at two o’clock for a bookstore in Noe Valley called Damned Spot. Inspectors Chi and McNeil were in the van parked on Twenty-fourth Street, and I was wired for sound. Inspectors Lemke and Samuels were undercover, loitering in front of and behind the store.

  My palms were damp as I waited with Conklin in the patrol car. The Kevlar vest I was wearing was hot, but it was my racing mind that was causing the heat.

  Could this be it? Was Linc Weber also known as Pidge?

  At three thirty Conklin and I got out of the car and walked around the corner to the bookstore.

  Damned Spot was an old-fashioned bookstore, dark, filled with mystery books, secondhand paperbacks, a two-books-for-one section. It bore no resemblance to the air-conditioned chain stores with latte bars and smooth jazz coming over the speakers.

  The cashier was an androgynous twenty-something in black clothes, hair buzzed to a bristle, and multiple face piercings. I asked for Linc Weber, and the cashier told me in a sweet feminine voi............