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The smell is what first gets to him when Harry opens the cargo container. His loafers make an awful wet noise when he steps inside of it.
The blood on the floor is at least an inch deep and Laura's three-year-old son is crouched in the middle of it all, sniffling, chubby fingers clutching long strands of hair attached to a body lying face down on the ground. You can't tell that the hair in his hands, dyed rust-red with blood, used to be dishwater blond. The body on the ground is female, cut off through the torso, and Harry doesn't want to think about it.
The kid - Dexter, Harry recalls - looks up at him with wide, watery eyes. Dexter used to interrupt recorded interviews with Laura by hooking his tiny fingers on his mother's teeth, letting Laura gnaw on them playfully, before sticking his thumb back into his own mouth. And when Harry crouches down to pick Dexter up, the boy immediately leans toward him, trusting little-boy arms wrapping around the back of Harry's neck.
That's when another small arm darts out and grabs the back of Dexter's top, white-knuckled, holding them back. Harry looks down and sees the other boy for the first time.
He walks out of the cargo container with both of them, Dexter in his arms, and Laura's older son following them with his hand protectively wrapped around his brother's ankle. After child services finishes processing all the necessary paperwork, Harry takes both of them home with him that night.
Dexter walks up to him just as he finishes separating the leg from the corpse of the neighbor's dog. The cartilage gives with a satisfying crunch that makes Brian smile.
Dexter doesn't cry. He doesn't run away to Harry. Instead, he plops onto the ground, and crawls over, staring in fascination at what used to be Buddy. They're hidden behind the clump of bushes at the edge of the backyard. "Biney, what are you doing?" he asks, curious.
Brian wipes off the kitchen knife he stole from the Morgans on the grass and lays it next to the trowel he took out of Harry's shed. "Making sure it doesn't bark at us so loud." Buddy is making a mess and he itches to clear it away, but Dexter has to understand first. "Don't tell Harry."
"I won't tell." Dexter nods, whole body moving with the motion. He climbs onto Brian's back, resting his head against the crook of Brian's neck reassuringly. "He was mean."
They sit there for a little while, sun beating down on them. The summer is sticky hot, and Brian likes it here, just the two of them together, Harry at work and Doris preoccupied with Deb inside the house. School will be starting soon, fence separating the area where his second grade class has recess from where Dexter and the other kindergartners are taught.
Dexter eventually moves away. He reaches down to touch the pool of blood collecting beneath the dog's body, looks at the thick red coating on his fingers. Brian grabs Dexter's wrist before his brother touches his own shirt.
"Careful. You're gonna get all dirty," he says, and helps Dexter wipe his hand off on blades of grass.
Brian has behavioral problems at his new junior high school; belligerent and angry, with issues too loud to ignore, and Doris convinces Harry to have him meet with his counselor every week.
Harry comes home one evening to Doris screaming from inside the house, and he runs through the garage, past the living room, and down the hall.
Brian is on the ground at the end of the hallway, straddling Deb, teenaged hands wrapped tight around her neck as her eyes roll back. Doris is on the ground, still weakened from the latest round of chemo and frantically pulling at Brian's long, thin fingers while he snarls down at Deb, screaming, "Don't you fucking touch him. Don't you fucking touch him!" as Dexter looks on, frozen.
Harry pulls Brian off of her, ignoring Brian's attempts to claw at his eyes, and throws him face first against the bathroom doorway, Harry's arm braced against the back of the boy's neck as Brian struggles against him, spit flying.
Brian stops moving. Dexter is crouching by Deb, helping her sit up as she chokes and coughs, breathing in harshly. Dexter looks back at Brian, biting his lip and looking hesitant, and Brian starts struggling against Harry's grip again. "No, Dexter. Dexter!"
They end up committing Brian to a hospital, their family too spent, with Doris tired and Deb crying and Dexter blank-faced as he stares at nothing. Dexter stops smiling without prompting from Harry.
When Harry finds the cat's grave, with tools buried beside it, he takes Dexter fishing and gets Dexter to admit to killing it, saying he wanted to stop it from clawing at Doris's bushes. "Do you remember what happened to you before that night I found you and Brian?"
Dexter glances up at Harry with Laura Moser's scared hazel eyes, then looks away to study the water carefully. "Am I going where Brian is, Dad?" he asks instead, ignoring Harry's question.
"You're a good kid, Dex," Harry says, and pulls an arm around his son. He doesn't bring up the efficient cuts he found on the cat's body.
There's still time to get this one right.