The deputy stepped inside, and Biscuit lunged toward Willow’s bedroom the second he heard her voice. I let the leash go, and the sound that came from my daughter when that dog jumped onto her bed is a sound I will never forget. Then the deputy opened his folder on my coffee table, right beside my mother’s spilled tea, and asked a single question that drained the color from her face.

“Ma’am, can you confirm which account received the payment for this animal?” My mother started to say the buyer paid cash, that there was nothing to trace. But the deputy turned the folder toward her. The buyer, worried he had unknowingly purchased a stolen dog, had paid partly by a transfer app to hold the animal earlier that day. And the name on the receiving account was not my mother’s.