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The second one was about Ryan and Donna Kilgore, also written by Dowd. I read the first several paragraphs and saw that Dowd had placed her original allegations, and statement, up much higher in the story than her second statement, the one in which she’d denied everything after we’d confronted her.

This version included a quotation from Danny Wolf.

“It’s pretty clear,” he said, “that after I presented Donna’s story to my sister, and our coach, money changed hands. I’m guessing quite a lot of it.”

Donna Kilgore was unavailable for comment. Dowd had written that Ryan and I were, too, though he’d never reached out to me. I could check with Ryan but assumed that Dowd hadn’t reached out to him, either. There were clearly about as many journalistic rules at play here as there would have been in dogfighting.

I looked briefly at the rest of the site. There was a story about a married city councilman and a teenage girl one year out of Convent & Stuart Hall—where she was a classmate of the councilman’s youngest daughter—including a text-message exchange. There were naked pictures of one of the city’s longest-tenured eleven o’clock anchors that someone had shot in her dressing room at the station.

And there was the promise of a message board, advertised as a page that would be required reading for all San Francisco once it was up and running by the end of the day.

I pointed to that and said to Thomas, “Another reason to live.”

I reached over and closed my screen, feeling as if I still needed my bottle of Purell from back in the COVID days.

“In the end, they got these stories out there,” I said to Thomas.

Thomas put a hand on my shoulder and said, “Like they took us both out with one shot.”

Fifty-One

CANTOR LIKED TO SURPRISE PEOPLE.Get them out of their comfort zone. Off their game, if he could manage, which he usually could. It’s why he rarely set up appointments for interviews when he was working a case. Just show up and flash his badge, like he was shining a light into their eyes.

Like today.

He wanted to hit Jack Wolf with the affair with his stepmother—what else could Cantor call her, his nanny?—and see how he reacted, especially now that he was distracted by what had happened at the paper over the past forty-eight hours and by the new website, which Cantor thought was dumber than a bag of hammers.

He was saving the stepmother, what would be round 2 with her, until later. Rachel Wolf seemed to hate Joe Wolf—now that he was dead, anyway—as much as his sons had when their father was still alive. She’d clearly thought she was getting more in the will, even with their prenup and even though Cantor knew the house in which she was still living was worth plenty. But it was like a lot of things. It was worth plenty only if she put it on the market and decided to downsize her living situation, at least when she wasn’t shacking up with her stepson.

Somehow Cantor didn’t think she was the type.

But Rachel really was for later. The way another interview with Elise Wolf was. Somebody could be lying. Maybe somebody did know the contents of the will before the reading. Maybe they were all lying their asses off. Maybe Cantor would never know what happened to old Joe Wolf that night and give this up, move on. He just wasn’t there yet. Not even close.

His focus today was on Jack Wolf out on the water, getting himself some after-work exercise. Maybe blowing off some steam after what his sister had done to him.

There were a lot of rowers out there, even in the early evening, some of them in the longer boats looking as if they belonged to school teams, to the point where sometimes Jack Wolf’s boat looked like a solitary flyspeck in the distance. He had been out there awhile. Cantor waited. He really did believe he could teach a master class in waiting.

Seeing how far out Jack was, Cantor was considering a quick ride up the street to the Starbucks he’d passed on his way here when Jenny Wolf showed up, her car screeching to a halt on the other side of the parking lot.

Fifty-Two

I WAITED FOR HIMon the dock, having come straight here from our late practice at Hunters Point. I’d hoped that perhaps being on the field with the kids would make me less angry at my brother than I was.

It had not. I had been working up to this confrontation all day, from the time I’d entered the tedious portal for Wolf.com.

Jack pulled himself out of the water and then the scull, which he had on his shoulder when he saw me. He stopped where he was. I walked down to him.

“I can’t believe it took you this long to come looking for me,” he said.

“I still hadrealjobs to go to.”

He laid the long, thin boat down next to him. I pointed to it.

“Shame that somebody couldn’t fall out of one of these and drown.”

“Where do you want to do this?” he said. “I’ve got somewhere I need to be.”

“Hell?”