She put down her pencil and reached for the receiver. “Hello?”

“Funny,” a man said.

“Excuse me?”

“They never heard of him.”

“I’m sorry,” she said, “but I think you’ve got the wrong number.” “This is you, Mrs. Devon?”

She recognized the voice now. It was him. Streck.

For a moment, she could not speak.

He said, “They never heard of him. I called the Santa Barbara police and asked to speak with Officer Devon, but they said they don’t have an Officer Devon on the force. Isn’t that odd, Mrs. Devon?”

“What do you want?” she asked shakily.

“I figure it’s a computer error,” Streck said, laughing quietly. “Yeah, sure, some sort of computer error dropped your husband from their records. I think you’d better tell him as soon as he gets home, Mrs. Devon. If he doesn’t get this straightened out… why, hell, he might not get his paycheck at the end of the week.”

He hung up, and the sound of the dial tone made her realize that she should have hung up first, should have slammed down the handset as soon as he said that he’d called the police station. She dared not encourage him even to the extent of listening to him on the phone.

She went through the house, checking all the windows and doors. They were securely locked.

At McDonald’s on East Chapman Avenue in Orange, Travis Cornell had ordered five hamburgers for the golden retriever. Sitting on the front seat of the pickup, the dog had eaten all of the meat and two buns, and it had wanted to express its gratitude by licking his face.

“You’ve got the breath of a dyspeptic alligator,” he protested, holding the animal back.

The return trip to Santa Barbara took three and a half hours because the highways were much busier than they had been that morning. Throughout the journey, Travis glanced at his companion and spoke to it, anticipating a display of the unnerving intelligence it had shown earlier. His expectations were unfulfilled. The retriever behaved like any dog on a long trip. Once in a while, it did sit very erect, looking through the windshield or side window at the scenery with what seemed an unusual degree of interest and attention. But most of the time it curled up and slept on the seat, snuffling in its dreams- or it panted and yawned and looked bored.

When the odor of the dog’s filthy coat became intolerable, Travis rolled down the windows for ventilation, and the retriever stuck its head out in the wind. With its ears blown back, hair streaming, it grinned the foolish and charmingly witless grin of all dogs who had ever ridden shotgun in such a fashion.

In Santa Barbara, Travis stopped at a shopping center, where he bought Several cans of Alpo, a box of Milk-Bone dog biscuits, heavy plastic dishes for pet food and water, a galvanized tin washtub, a bottle of pet shampoo With a flea- and tick-killing compound, a brush to comb out the animal’s tangled coat, a collar, and a leash.

As Travis loaded those items into the back of the pickup, the dog watched him through the rear window of the cab, its damp nose pressed to the glass. Getting behind the wheel, he said, “You’re filthy, and you stink. You’re not going to be a lot of trouble about taking a bath, are you?” The dog yawned.

By the time Travis pulled into the driveway of his four-room rented bungalow on the northern edge of Santa Barbara and switched off the pickup’s engine, he was beginning to wonder if the pooch’s actions that morning had really been as amazing as he remembered.

“If you don’t show me the right stuff again soon,” he told the dog as he slipped his key into the front door of the house, “I’m going to have to assume that I stripped a gear out there in the woods, that I’m just nuts and that I imagined everything.”

Standing beside him on the stoop, the dog looked up quizzically.

“Do you want to be responsible for giving me doubts about my own sanity? Hmmmmm?”

An orange and black butterfly swooped past the retriever’s face, startling it. The dog barked once and raced after the fluttering prey, off the stoop, down the walkway. Dashing back and forth across the lawn, leaping high, snapping at the air, repeatedly missing its bright quarry, it nearly collided with the diamond-patterned trunk of a big Canary Island date palm, then narrowly avoided knocking itself unconscious in a head-on encounter with a concrete birdbath, and at last crashed clumsily into a bed of New Guinea impatiens over which the butterfly soared to safety. The retriever rolled once, scrambled to its feet, and lunged out of the flowers.

When it realized that it had been foiled, the dog returned to Travis. It gave him a sheepish look.

“Some wonder dog,” he said. “Good grief.”

He opened the door, and the retriever slipped in ahead of him. It padded off immediately to explore these new rooms.

“You better be housebroken,” Travis shouted after it.

He carried the galvanized washtub and the plastic bag full of other purchases into the kitchen. He left the food and pet dishes there, and took everything else outside through the back door. He put the bag on the concrete patio and set the tub beside it, near a coiled hose that was attached to an outdoor faucet.

Inside again, he removed a bucket from beneath the kitchen sink, filled it with the hottest water he could draw, carried it outside, and emptied it into the tub. When Travis had made four trips with the hot water, the retriever appeared and began to explore the backyard. By the time Travis filled the tub more than half full, the dog had begun to urinate every few feet along the whitewashed concrete-block wall that defined the property line, marking its territory.

“When you finish killing the grass,” Travis said, “you’d better be in the mood for a bath. You reek.”

The retriever turned toward him and cocked its head and appeared to listen when he spoke. But it did not look like one of those smart dogs in the movies. It did not look as if it understood him. It just looked dumb. As soon as he stopped talking, it hurried a few steps farther along the wall and peed again. Watching the dog relieve itself, Travis felt an urge of his own. He went inside to the bathroom, then changed into an older pair of jeans and a T-shirt for the sloppy job ahead.

When Travis came outside again, the retriever was standing beside the steaming washtub, the hose in its teeth. Somehow, it had managed to turn the faucet. Water gushed out of the hose, into the tub.

For a dog, successfully manipulating a water faucet would be very difficult if not impossible. Travis figured that an equivalent test of his own ingenuity and dexterity would be trying to open a child-proof safety cap on an aspirin bottle with one hand behind his back.

Astonished, he said, “Water’s too hot for you?”

The retriever dropped the hose, letting water pour across the patio, and stepped almost daintily into the tub. It sat and looked at him, as if to say, Let’s get on with it, you dink.

He went to the tub and squatted beside it. “Show me how you can turn off the water.”

The dog looked at him stupidly.

“Show me,” Travis said.

The dog snorted and shifted its position in the warm water.

“If you could turn it on, you can turn it off. How did you do it? With your teeth? Had to be with your teeth. Couldn’t do it with a paw, for God’s sake. But that twisting motion would be tricky. You could’ve broken a tooth on the cast-iron handle.”

The dog leaned slightly out of the tub, just far enough to bite at the neck of the bag that held the shampoo.

“You won’t turn off the faucet?” Travis asked.

The dog just blinked at him, inscrutable.

He sighed and turned off the water. “All right. Okay. Be a wiseass.” He took the brush and shampoo out of the bag and held them toward the retriever. “Here. You probably don’t even need me. You can scrub yourself, I’m sure.”