The post had come up in his feed at five forty-five, and by the time Brian Tuttle turned onto Laura's street in Upland at noon he had read it three times. Somebody in a white van had broken into a reputable breeder's place in Bloomington and stolen a breeding female. It was the wording that had caught him. Reputable breeder. He had seen those words before, in an ad for puppies from champion bloodlines, under a picture with a black pickup on big tires in the background and a man in sunglasses holding a puppy up to the camera by the scruff.

The man's name was Curtis Haney. Brian had had him in a folder for weeks.

Laura was standing in the doorway with her arms crossed when he parked. She had cut her hair since last time. It suited her. He meant to tell her so, but she had already turned around and called for Lexi.

"Six," she said. "Not six-fifteen."

"Six."

Lexi came out past her mother with her headphones around her neck and a canvas bag over her shoulder. She was fourteen and had gotten taller since the last time, or else it was the shoes. She got into the passenger seat and pulled up her knees, and when she looked at him sideways he could tell she already knew. Maybe it was how he had pulled in, or the phone lying on the dashboard with the screen up and the map on.

"Where are we going?"

"Rialto first. It'll take an hour, and then we've got the rest of the day."

"Last time it was Riverside."

"This is different."

Lexi looked out the side window.

At the lights on Foothill he ate a breakfast burrito out of a paper bag even though it was noon. He didn't notice what was in it until the egg ran down his shirt. On the freeway heading east Lexi got to pick the music. She picked a song he didn't know, and when he tried to hum along anyway she turned it down.

After the Fontana exit Lexi turned to him.

"Our bio teacher has a snake in the classroom."

"What kind of snake?"

"A ball python. He feeds the snake frozen mice on Fridays, in front of the whole class."

"Frozen?"

"He thaws them first, in a bowl of warm water." She made a face. "It's supposed to be a reward. For getting through the week."

"For you guys or for the snake?"

She laughed. "His name's Gerald."

"The snake or the teacher?"

"The snake!"

"Why Gerald?"

"Dunno. I'll ask."

For five minutes they talked about nothing but Gerald and what a snake might think about Fridays, and whether you were allowed to take him home over summer vacation, which Lexi thought you were if you asked nicely.

At eight that morning Randy Ruelas had sent a text, a number and a few words: Her name's Vanessa. Cash. Randy had been the night editor at the Foothill Ledger for years, until the day the paper cut everything it couldn't sell ads around, and these days he stood behind a bar in Rialto and heard more than he ever had in the newsroom. Brian had asked him to listen for the name Haney, and it had taken Randy more than a week to find somebody who would talk.

He found the van on his second pass through the blocks north of the tracks, not far from Cedar, where someone in the comments under the post had seen a white van several times. It was parked outside a low fifties house with 412 on the mailbox, crooked, with two wheels up on the curb, as if whoever drove it had been in a hurry to get inside. Brian drove past without slowing down and parked three houses away, where he waited a while with the engine running.

Lexi leaned forward. "Is this it?"

"Maybe."

On the steps of the house next door sat a man in a tank top with a bag of frozen peas against his face. Brian took a picture of the van through the side window, then one of the man, and got out.

The man's name was Rudy Ybarra, and he didn't need persuading. He took the peas away to show him. The bruise was high on his left cheekbone, dark and swollen, and the skin had split in a short curve where the knuckles had landed. He said it had happened around nine, that he had come out on his own steps and she had been standing in his yard moving his dog, and that she had hit him without a word. Rudy knew her name, Dana Burkhart, because her mail sometimes ended up in his box. He said he had seen the van come home around four that morning and that she had carried something in through the kitchen door in her arms, something that hung limp.

"She's nuts," Rudy said. "Ask anybody."

Brian didn't ask anybody. While Rudy talked, Brian's eyes went over the yard. In the middle of the burnt lawn, in full sun, there was an old hole where a pipe had been, and around it a ring where the grass was worn down to dirt, as far as a chain would reach. The pipe now stood a little way off, in the shade of the garage, with fresh dirt kicked up around the base. The yellow dog lay beside it asleep, and next to his nose was a full water bowl. Brian made a note: Rudy Ybarra, fifty-something. Left cheek. Peas. Says "without a word." Old hole in sun. New hole in shade. Bowl full.

While they were standing there, a black pickup came rolling down the street at a crawl, jacked up on oversized tires, with tinted windows. It slowed down even more at the van. Brian raised his phone and took a few shots, and the last one showed the license plate. Rudy watched it go with the peas halfway to his cheek and said he didn't recognize it.

Five minutes later, when the pickup came back from the other direction, the door of 412 opened. A wiry woman with short hair, in a gray tank top and jeans, with the shoulders of somebody who carried heavy things every day, came out with a baseball bat in her hand. She walked down the driveway without hurrying and stood in the middle of the street in the sun, right in the way. The pickup slammed on its brakes in front of her. She took two steps forward and hit the hood so hard the bang carried all the way to Rudy's steps, and when whoever was behind the wheel did nothing, she stepped to the side and smashed the left headlight. The pickup backed up with its tires screaming, swung around with two wheels up on Rudy's lawn, so close that Rudy pulled his legs up, and disappeared toward the corner. She stayed in the street with the bat in her hand and broken glass around her feet until the sound of the engine had died away.

Brian had forgotten to take pictures. He stood with the phone in his hand and felt something he hadn't felt in a long time, a kind of hunger high up in his chest. Behind him in the car, Lexi sat with both hands against the side window.

He took Lexi to a taqueria on Foothill and bought tacos that they ate in the car with the AC on, and while she ate he zoomed in on the picture of the pickup. After a few minutes he found the same plate in one of Haney's old ads, at the very edge of the frame behind a pen of puppies, half hidden by a plastic pool. He showed Lexi the two pictures side by side on the screen.

Lexi looked with her mouth full. "Same truck."

"Same truck."

"So?"

"So he reported the theft to the police. He's posting in the neighborhood group about reputable breeding." Brian held up the phone. "Then he drives past her house twice at a crawl on the same day."

"He wanted to see where she lived."

"He already knew that. Otherwise he wouldn't have found it."

"Then he wanted her to see him."

He hadn't thought of it that way. "And when she smashes up his truck in the middle of the street, in front of witnesses, he doesn't call the cops."

"Maybe he didn't have time."

"A guy who calls the cops about a stolen dog calls about a broken headlight too. Unless he's got something on his property the cops can't see."

Lexi chewed. "And she knew that."

"She knew that. She wasn't scared of him. She wanted him to know she wasn't."

"You sound like when you do crosswords."

"And you sounded like me."

She rolled her eyes and smiled. He laughed and started writing down on his phone what they had worked out. Lexi wouldn't say anything about it; he knew that.

While Lexi finished her soda he searched the name Rudy had given him. The search turned up one hit on the Foothill Ledger's website, a brief from last fall, four paragraphs long: an employee at the county animal shelter in Devore had been fired after a physical altercation with a dog owner at the front desk. The brief gave no name. A comment under it did, from someone who wrote that Dana Burkhart was the only one up there who cared, and under the comment someone else had replied with a thumbs-up and a typo.

Around three he parked at the curb behind the van.

"Stay in the car. Five minutes."

He walked up the driveway and knocked. The door opened while he was still knocking. Up close she was smaller than she had looked in the street. The knuckles on her right hand were swollen and red. He had time to see that, and the hallway behind her, a bowl of water on the floor and a blanket, before he met her eyes.

"Dana Burkhart?"

"Who's asking?"

"Brian Tuttle. I'm a journalist. I'm writing about Curtis Haney."

"I don't know anybody by that name."

"But you know where he lives."

She didn't answer. Somewhere inside the house a dog started whining, high and thin, without letting up. It sounded like a young dog, and it sounded like an animal that was afraid of him in particular. Brian tilted his head and listened.

"I think we want the same thing."

"You want a picture."

He raised the phone, turned halfway around, and took a picture of the van.

"Give me the phone."

"This is a public street."

She knocked the phone out of his hand. It bounced off the step and landed in the gravel, and the door slammed in his face before he could bend down.

He picked up the phone and wiped it on his pants leg. A crack ran from the corner diagonally across the screen, but the picture was still there, and so was the license plate. He stood on the steps for a while and heard the whining inside die down, as if someone had sat down beside the dog. He was pleased as he walked back to the car, and on the way he typed woman bigger than Haney? into his notes app with his thumb.

Lexi had taken off her headphones. "Who was that?"

"Somebody who rescues dogs."

Haney's number was in the ad, under the picture of the puppies. Brian called from the car, with the engine running and Lexi beside him, before he'd had time to think about whether he should wait. He used the voice he kept for calls like that, calm and a little boring, the voice that made people think he already knew most of it and only wanted it confirmed. He introduced himself and said he was writing about breeding in the Inland Empire and would like to meet and talk about the theft on Saturday night.

The line went quiet.

"Who gave you this number?"

Then a click. Brian wrote the line down word for word in his notes app, under Rudy Ybarra and the peas.

Lexi didn't say anything. She had turned toward the side window and was looking out at the street, where Rudy was still sitting on his steps, and he waited for her to ask. She didn't. He put the phone down and started the car, and asked if she wanted ice cream. She said she was full.

At a gas station by the freeway he bought coffee and a bag of sunflower seeds, and while Lexi was in the restroom he sent two texts. The first went to Randy: Thanks. I'll be in touch. The second went to the number Randy had given him: Brian here. Cholla Diner on Foothill, 8:30? My treat. The answer came before Lexi was back, a single word, ok, and he sat with the phone in his hand until Lexi knocked on the window.

He dropped her off at six-ten. Laura wasn't in the doorway this time. She opened the door before they reached the steps, looked at her watch over Lexi's head and then at him, and said nothing.

Lexi stopped on the steps and turned around, one hand on the doorframe. "What happened to the dog? The one she took."

She waited.

"I don't know yet. I'll tell you when I know."

"Promise?"

"I promise."

The Cholla Diner was on Foothill in Fontana, between a tire shop and a motel, and had been open around the clock since the sixties. Brian took a booth at the back with his back to the wall and ordered pie and coffee for two and a patty melt for himself. He hadn't eaten since the tacos and got through half the sandwich before she came.

She was ten minutes late. He recognized her because she was looking for someone without looking as if she was looking. She had on a short black jacket in spite of the heat and wore her hair in a glossy braid over one shoulder, and her nails were freshly done in a dark red.

"You're Brian."

"You're Vanessa. Sit down. I ordered for both of us, I hope that's okay."

"Depends what you ordered."

"Pie. And coffee."

She sat down and put her hands on the table, and the polish shone in the lamplight. She knew she was beautiful and used it the way other people use a handshake. He watched her eyes go over him, over his hands and his face, and stay a second too long, as if she were looking for something to hold on to. Something in him answered. He let it lie, as he let everything lie that didn't belong to the story, and put his phone on the table between them with the cracked screen up and pressed record.

"I'm recording. Is that okay?"

"Randy said you pay."

"I pay."

Then she was quiet for a long time. Brian had learned early that the silence belonged to the other person and that it nearly always got filled, and he took a bite of his sandwich while he waited.

"Tell it like I've never seen a dog," he said.

She started carefully, with things anybody could have known, that it was Saturdays and that it was out in Bloomington behind a barn. Then the rest came, and it came faster than he had expected. She told him who drove her out there and what his name was, which men usually stood closest to the pit and what they bet, and where the money was kept during the night, in a cooler with beer on top. She told him what happened to the dogs that didn't get up again and where they were carried afterward, and what she herself had worn last Saturday and why, because Brandon wanted her to be seen.

Brian asked for details, the kind of thing that made a story believable to an editor: dates, times, which side of the barn, the color of the cooler. She gave him everything and more. He took notes by hand as well, though the phone was recording, because people talked more when they saw a pen moving. While she talked he finished the sandwich and his own pie, and he couldn't have said what it tasted like.

When she reached for a napkin to draw him the barn, her jacket sleeve slid up. On her upper arm there was a mark under a layer of makeup that had started to wear off, yellow and green at the edges and shaped like fingers. She pulled the sleeve down and finished the drawing. He wrote arm – Brandon? in the margin and didn't ask, because that wasn't what he was there for. She gave him one more name after that, one of Haney's guys, though he hadn't asked for it.

After half an hour she leaned back in the booth and looked at him again.

"Nobody's asked me anything in five years that wasn't about price."

He didn't know what to say to that, so he said nothing. She hadn't touched her pie.

"You can use it," she said. "All of it. You can say it was me."

"I protect my sources."

"I see what you're doing."

She smiled when she said it, for the first time, and he wrote that down too.

When she stood up, he took the envelope out of his inside pocket and put it on the table in front of her. There was three hundred dollars in it, in twenties.

"This is for your time," he said, "not for what you say."

She put the envelope in her jacket without opening it and left. He watched her walk past the window out toward Foothill, heading west, into the warm evening.

On the freeway home to Colton he listened to the recording again from the beginning. Her voice through the car speakers sounded younger than it had in the booth. In a few places he rewound, and in one of them he heard himself chewing. The trucks sat in the right lane with their rows of orange lights, and he passed them one after another without seeing them while he put what he had in order in his head: Haney, the Saturdays, the barn in Bloomington, the woman with the baseball bat, and the dog behind the door who was afraid of him before she had even seen him.

At the exit the phone lit up in its holder. It was a text from Lexi.

you promised to tell me about the dog

He read it at the red light. The recording kept going, and Vanessa was talking about the cooler with the beer on top, and he thought that was the lede, that was where it would start. Then he paused the recording and typed with his thumb:

She's alive, I think. I heard her through the door. Rest next time, I promise.

Someone honked behind him. He hit send and drove through the intersection. When he turned the recording back on, Vanessa went on in the middle of a sentence about who usually drove.