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 voice that Linc worked upstairs.
I could almost hear the scratching sound of mice nesting in the stacks as we crept along the narrow aisles and edged past customers who looked psychologically borderline. In the back of the store was a plain wooden staircase with a sign on a chain across the handrails reading NO ENTRY.
Conklin unlatched the chain, and we started up the stairs, which opened into an attic room. The ceiling was cathedral-style, but low, only eight feet high under the peak, tapering to about three feet high at the side walls. In the back of the room was a desk where high piles of magazines, papers, and books surrounded a computer with two large screens.
And behind the desk was a black kid, maybe fifteen, reed-thin, with black-rimmed glasses, no visible tattoos, and no jewelry, unless you counted the braces on his teeth, which I saw when he looked up and smiled.
My high hopes fell.
This wasn’t Pidge. The governor’s description of Pidge was of a stocky white kid, long brown hair.
I’m Linc,” the boy said. “Welcome to CrimeWeb dot com.
