sphincter pupillae-the muscle causing the iris to contract, thereby
shrinking the pupil and admitting less light to the eye-had all but
atrophied.
Also, the dilator pupillae had sluunk, pulling the iris wide open. And
the connection between the dilator muscle and oculomotor nerve was
fused, leaving the eye virtually no ability to reduce the amount of
incoming light. The condition was without precedent and degenerative in
nature, making surgical correction impossible. The boy was provided
with heavily tinted, wraparound sunglasses. Even then he preferred to
pass daylight hours only in rooms where metal blinds or heavy drapes
could close off the light. Incredibly, Jeremy became a favorite of the
staff at the rehabilitation hospital to which he was transferred a few
days after awakening at the nursing home. They were inclined to feel
sorry for him because of his eye affliction, and because he was such a
good-looking boy who had fallen so low. In addition, he now had the
sweet temperament of a shy child, a result of his IQ loss, and there was
no sign whatsoever of his former arrogance, cool calculation, and
smouldering hostility.
For over four months he walked the halls, helped the nurses with simple
tasks, struggled with a speech therapist to little effect, stared out
the windows at the night for hours at a time, ate well enough to put
flesh on his bones, and exercised in the gym during the evening with
most of the lights off. His wasted body was rebuilt, and his straws
hair regained its Almost ten months ago, when Jonas was beginning to
wonder where Jeremy could be placed when he was no longer able to
benefit from physical or occupational therapy, the boy had disappeared.
Although he had shown no previous inclination to roam beyond the grounds
of the rehabilitation hospital, he walked out unnoticed one night, and
never came back.
Jonas had assumed the police would be quick to track the boy. But they
had been interested in him only as a missing person, not as a suspected
murderer. If he had regained all of his faculties, they would have
considered him both a threat and a fugitive from justice, but his
continued-and apparently permanent-mental disabilities were a kind of
immunity.
Jeremy was no longer the same person that he had been when the crimes
were committed; with his diminished intellectual capacity, inability to
speak, and beguilingly simple personility, no jury would ever convict.
A missing-person investigation was no investigation at all. Police
manpower had to be directed against immediate and serious crimes.
Though the cops believed that the boy had probably wandered away, fallen
into the hands of the wrong people, and already been exploited and
killed, Jonas knew his son was alive. And in his hear the knew that
what was loose in the world was not a sniveling dullard but a cunning,
dangerous, and exceedingly sick young man.
They had all been deceived.
He could not prove that Jeremy’s retardation was an act, but in his
heart he knew that he had allowed himself to be fooled. He had accepted
the new Jeremy because, when it came right down to it, he could not bear
the anguish of having to confront the Jeremy who had killed Marion and
Stephanie. The most damning proof of his own complicity in Jeremy’s
fraud was the fact that he had not requested a CAT scan to determine the
precise nature of the brain damage. At the time he told himself the
fact of the damage was the only thing that mattered, not its precise
etiology, an incredible reaction for any physician but not so incredible
for a father who was unwilling to come face-to-face with the monster
inside his son.
And now the monster was set free. He had no proof, but he knew.
Jeremy was out there somewhere. The old Jeremy.
For ten months, through a series of three detective agencies, he had
sought his son, because he shared in the moral, though not the legal,
responsibility for any crimes the boy committed. The first two agencies
had gotten nowhere, eventually concluding that their inability to pick
up a trail meant no trail existed. The boy, they reported, was most