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“Go for it,” Cantor said.

Then I called Megan Callahan. We talked a long time.

“This is solid?” she said.

“More solid than Alcatraz.”

Then I told her there was only one condition—that she hold it off the website and save it for tomorrow morning’s print edition, embargoing it until then.

It was exactly what she did.

First thing in the morning I drove over to Pacific Heights, the copy of the SundayTribunethat had been delivered to my house on the seat next to me.

The story splashed across our front page, with Megan Callahan’s byline on it, said that theTribunehad learned from police department sources that Jack Wolf was now being treated as a person of interest in his brother Thomas’s death. And that he might be facing an obstruction charge for withholding information from the police about events in which he was involved the night Thomas died.

Jack Wolf had opened the front door before I made it halfway up the walk.

I handed him the paper. He wouldn’t take it, saying he’d already seen it.

“Solid front page, though, don’t you think? Almost worthy of Wolf.com.”

“You did this,” he said. “You and your friend Cantor.”

“No idea what you’re talking about.”

“I’ll have his ass,” Jack Wolf said.

“Good luck with that.”

I dropped the paper at his feet and started back toward my car.

Halfway there, I turned around.

“One more thing, Jack. A message, really. For you and your friend Gallo and whatever other skeevy people you might currently be involved with.”

“And what might that be?”

“This is only the beginning,” I said.

Eighty-Eight

BEN CANTOR THOUGHT HEmight be the only one who fully appreciated the irony of theTribune“exclusive” naming Jack Wolf as a person of interest in his brother Thomas’s death.

They wereallpersons of interest to Cantor by now—the whole family, from the Queen Mother on down.

That included Jenny, as much as Cantor didn’t want it to and even though in his mind it really didn’t.

For now.

Cantor and Jenny were having their first glass of wine at Harris’ steak house, in Russian Hill, both of them in the mood to piss off the red-meat police, when Cantor said to her, “I can’t wait to hear the thinking behind your bringing your brother Danny back into the fold.”

“It might just be the one about keeping your friends close and your enemies closer,” Jenny said. “That doesn’t work for you, Detective Cantor?”

“Not with a weasel like Danny.”

“Okay, then how about the one about how it’s better to have somebody on the inside of the tent pissing out rather than the other way around?” Jenny said, smiling at him.

Cantor grinned. “Okay, I’m begging you to stop.”