PART 2 I have to tell you about Moose before the morning, because if all you know of him is “Pit Bull in a crib,” you’ll see the wrong thing, the way I saw the wrong thing. We adopted Moose at ten weeks from a rescue that had pulled his mother off the street pregnant.…

PART 2 I have to slow down and tell you the state she was in, because the cruelty of it matters, and because what she did despite it is the whole spine of this story. Reyes got on the radio while I got down on my knees in front of her, slow, hands open, talking…

PART 2 I have to tell you about Harold before I tell you the rest, because the whole story is really about him, even though he was already gone before it started. Especially because he was already gone. Harold was a quiet man. Fifty-nine years married to him and I can tell you the defining…

PART 2 I have to slow down and tell you what I found down there in more detail, because the cruelty of it is part of the story, and because what survived it is the rest. The setup, once the police divers and I reconstructed it, was deliberate and it was knowledgeable, which is the…

PART 2 I have to tell you about the dog, and about Katie, because the dog was hers before he was ours, and that’s the whole heart of it. The dog’s name was Biscuit. A Golden Retriever, four years old when Katie died, and he had been, from the day we got him as a…

PART 2 I have to make you understand the state they were in, because the cruelty of it is part of the story, and because what came out of that cruelty is the rest of it. The mother was emaciated. Skin and bone, except for the slack belly of a dog who’d recently given birth…

PART 2 I have to tell you about the jar, and about how Theo thinks, because it’s the whole key to what happened, and if you don’t understand the boy you’ll think what he did was just cute, and it was not cute. It was the most serious thing I’ve ever seen a child do.…

PART 2 I have to tell you about Eleanor and Charlie before I tell you the rest, because I learned it after, piecing it together from her chart and from her daughter and from the things the older staff remembered, and you can’t feel what happened without it. Charlie was her husband. Charles. They’d married…

PART 2 I have to tell you what Brick and Daniel were to each other, because if you’ve never been around a real working dog and his handler, you’ll picture a man and his pet, and that’s not what this was. Not even close. A K-9 and a handler are a marriage of a kind.…

PART 2 I have to tell you about Greyhound, because if you think of him as just a sweet bus mascot you’ll miss the whole thing. I got him at eight, nine weeks old from a guy outside a gas station in Tennessee who was giving away a litter from a cardboard box, the runt,…