The Education of Giacomo Jones Ch. 04

This is a work of fiction and any resemblance by any character or situation to any actual person or event is purely coincidental. All characters presented in this narrative are over the age of 18.

CHAPTER FOUR - The Horror

"Out? You mean out of prison?" Gia asked in disbelief.

"Yes," Calvita Jones said quietly on the other end.

"Ma, how can that be possible? Geno was convicted of major violent crimes, for God's sake," Gia said. "Did he escape?"

"No," Calvita Jones said in a dead, defeated voice. "He just had a birthday."

"A birthday?" Gia responded. "They let prisoners out of freakin' Pemberton because it's their birthday?"

"They do when you're sent up as a juvenile and it's your 18th birthday," her mom said. "That's the law in fuckin' New Jersey. They consider him an adult so it's like the awful crimes he did never even happened."

For her observant Catholic mother to drop the F-bomb, it had to be serious.

Gennaro Millientello, "Geno Millions" to his fellow street hoodlums, had been sent away three years earlier to New Jersey's juvenile detention center in Pemberton for a variety of offenses, all of which had been under seal and protected from public view as records pertaining to minors are for all but the most exceptional and heinous circumstances. But Giacomo Jones knew what he did because Geno did it to Gia's best friend, and her testimony helped put Geno away.

Geno Millions had once publicly boasted that Gia was his girlfriend, something she had forcefully and steadfastly rejected. When she testified against him in the closed juvenile court proceedings, he warned that someday he would find her and make her pay. And now, through a quirk in the law, this known sociopath had walked free as a bird from incarceration. Bygones were bygones, all but forgotten in the eyes of the law unless he got back into trouble.

"Ma, does he know where I am?" Gia asked.

"Not that I am aware, Gia, but it probably won't take him long to find out. All he's got to do is look you up on Instagram to see pictures of you at Fulbright and your football player boyfriend," her mother said. Silence hung in the air for a moment.

"I'm catching the next train down to Charlotte. We gotta get a plan in place."

Gia remained quiet, thinking over how she would handle this and wondering what good having her mom in Fallstrom would do.

"Gia?"

"Yeah, ma, I'm here. OK, text me when your train's expected to arrive in Charlotte and I will either come up and get you or make arrangements to bring you here," she said. "I love you, ma."

With that she hung up and dialed Rance. He answered on the first ring.

"Hey, gorgeous, how's my room?"

"Um... great. Feels like you're all around me," she said nervously. "But hey, I just heard from my mom and I really need to talk to somebody..."

Rance could hear the fear in her shaky voice and knew something was seriously off. He sprang off the sofa in his apartment and began pacing.

"What's wrong, Gia?"

She told him the violent story about Geno Millions, about his abrupt and unannounced release from juvenile detention and how she's got to be on guard, even 700 miles down the Atlantic Coast from Pemberton, New Jersey, in Fallstrom, South Carolina. She told Rance that her mom was expected to join her in Fallstrom in the next day or so.

"Did he ever hurt you?" Rance asked.

"No, not physically. He terrified Ma and me, especially after dad passed. Dad was a Marine who could destroy a little street thug like Geno with his bare hands and Geno knew it. But he badly hurt a lot of people who were very close to me growing up. He's a violent psychopath and a sadist who's never happier than when he's causing someone else pain."

"I think I need to tell Hemp right now and have Athletics arrange for security around your apartment and the facility in particular," Rance said. "Do we know whether this Millions guy is on his way here, what he looks like and so forth?"

Unfortunately, Gia said, no one has any clue where he might be. There are no photos of him since before he got sent up to Pemberton. And with his record of carjacking, he could steal and drive two or three different vehicles on his way south.

"I know you're shaken up by this, baby, but you're going to be OK. If nothing else, you can just remain there in my room with my folks if there's a threat to you here," he said.

He continued: "Look, I am going to call Coach Hemphill and inform him of all of this. While I do that, I want you to talk to mom and dad, tell them everything you just told me. Dad knows lots of lawyers and law enforcement all over the South and he and mom might have some good ideas. If nothing else, I think it will help you just being around people. Soon as we hang up, I am going to text them both and let them know you need to talk, OK?"

"Mmm hmm," she said, nodding her assent.

"I'm glad you told me, Gia. I love you," he said.

"Love you too," she replied.

●●●

Callie Jones's' train from Newark had arrived at the Amtrak terminal on North Tryon Street in Charlotte at 8:20 p.m. on Sunday, about 20 minutes behind schedule. Gia and Rance were waiting at the arrival gate.

"Ma, this is Rance Martin, the guy you call my 'football player boyfriend'," Gia said.

A compact woman with alert brown eyes, curly salt-and-pepper hair, a perfect olive complexion and her daughter's brilliant smile, Callie looked upward at her daughter's towering beau and reached to hug him. Rance had to bend forward and squat a bit to accommodate that, but it was a warmer greeting than Gia had expected from her mom.

"Geez, Gia told me you were tall but she didn't tell me you were a mountain," she said with a chuckle. "Pleased to meet you, Mistah Rance."

Traveling light was not something Calvita Jones or anyone in the Bertolli family line had done. After all, it was Callie's grandparents who packed all they owned into a couple of large trunks and arrived by a transatlantic steamship in the United States from Sicily during World War II. Even Rance found the huge, 50-year-old suitcase heavy as he lugged it to Gia's Camry for the 70-minute drive back to Fallstrom that they'd have to make in less than 70 minutes for Rance to make bed check.

On the ride back, Rance drove while Gia filled her mother in on steps they had taken to protect themselves from Geno Millions should he show up in the Carolina Piedmont. Coach Perry Hemphill had persuaded the University Police Department to post an officer in a cruiser in the Honors College parking lot day and night. The athletics facility was already well-patrolled and under 24-hour electronic surveillance year-round and the police chief believed nothing further was needed there. Gia would have an escort from the athletics staff into and out of the facility, and an officer would be on hand to cover her comings and goings from the residence hall, which police considered a softer target for a potential killer.

For the first night, Callie would bunk with her daughter in her Honors College studio. After that, she would check into the Fulbright Alumni Center Hotel just a block from her daughter. Rance lugged Callie's massive bag into Gia's room, then sprinted to his car parked outside and sped away, desperate to make it to his apartment before a trainer or equipment staffer knocked on his door at 10. He arrived just as Jesse Torgerson, a student trainer, was walking up to his apartment.

"Right on time," Rance said. "Here, stick your head in the door to see that Hurley's here."

Jesse did. "'Sup, Jess," Hurley said, sipping an enormous Sonic milkshake and waving halfheartedly from the sofa where he watched the second half of the Sunday Night Football game between the Packers and the Tampa Bay Buccaneers.

"Cutting it close getting home from Gia's, bro," Hurley said.

Rance explained that he'd just completed a white-knuckle drive back from the Amtrak station in Charlotte to bring Gia's mom to campus. Then he filled Hurley in on the drama surrounding the release of Geno Millions and the security measures that were being put in place.

"Hm. Odd," Hurley said.

"What's odd?" Rance replied.

"There was a South Carolina State Police cruiser parked on the corner just outside our parking lot for a couple of hours just after dinner. Cop was just sitting in there. I thought it was a pretty strange place to be running radar, but..." Hurley said. "Wonder if it had anything to do with this?"

"I'm going to find out," Rance said, and called his father.

"Dad, do you still know the guy who was with the FBI or something down in Columbia?"

"I know Ben Wharton, but he's the deputy U.S. attorney for South Carolina, not FBI. We were Vandy Law classmates. Why do you ask?"

Rance explained what Hurley had told him about the state police cruiser parked near his house, that it had made him curious if there wasn't more to this case than he or Gia knew. His dad told him he'd check with Wharton and probably get back to him Monday morning.

Just before he hung up, he heard the alert tone that meant he had received a text from Gia. Hers were the only texts that prompted the tone that sounded like the strumming of a harp. After he signed off with his dad, he checked Gia's text: Cops over here! It's bad.

Curfew be damned. Rance ran to his car and was back in the Honors College parking lot in three minutes. He saw two South Carolina State Police cruisers. He ran to Gia's door and knocked. A uniformed trooper opened the door and suspiciously eyed the enormous man in front of him wearing gym shorts and a Fulbright Football t-shirt.

"It's OK, officer. That's my boyfriend, Rance Martin," Gia told the officer, who seemed to relax. "I texted him. He plays football here. He reported the threat to Coach Hemphill yesterday, and Coach Hemp arranged for more campus security."

The officer whose name tag identified him as "CAPT. BLANDING," said nothing, but nodded and stepped back from the door, letting Rance enter, then closed the door behind him. Callie Jones was seated beside her daughter on the love seat in the studio. A man in khakis and a golf shirt with SCSP and the agency's logo stitched in gold on the upper left quadrant was leaning against the island in the kitchenette taking notes on a tablet in rigid leather binder. In a corner of the room stood another man wearing a black windbreaker with FBI similarly emblazoned above its left breast.

"So there was never any one-to-one relationship between yourself and the subject, correct?" Palmer Deason, the FBI agent, asked Gia.

"Correct. Though I think he had a crush on me at various times. We were in the same second-grade class at Catholic School in Bergen, but nobody wanted anything to do with him because even back then, he had a cruel streak. The nuns were always punishing him, but that only made him meaner. He was a bully, and even then he loved scaring and hurting people, but especially girls. Middle school was run by Jesuits, and they didn't put up with him at all. He tried to attack an instructor with his own paddle once and the instructor, who had been a New Jersey Golden Gloves champion, broke his jaw. The headmaster, a Jesuit priest, expelled him and Geno spent the rest of his time in public reform school before he got sent to lock-up," Gia said. "But no, there was never any relationship between us. I do think he left me alone while Dad was alive because he knew Dad was a Marine veteran who would kill him if he did anything to me and then later maybe because maybe he held out hope that there could be something between us, but there wasn't. And when I testified against him, that's when he became vengeful."

The plainclothes trooper nodded and made notes. The radio on the uniformed officer's belt crackled with an occasional message. Deason stood silently, seemingly deep in thought.

"I don't mean to intrude, but it's clear something's happened, considering the FBI is here with the State Police," Rance said. "Are we in danger?"

The FBI agent cleared his throat.

"Mr. Martin, we're afraid that you are. At a minimum Miss Jones is," Deason said. "There was a carjacking that went badly yesterday in Woodbridge, Virginia, in a shopping center just off Interstate 95. It's about 30 miles south of Washington and just a few miles from our training academy and Behavioral Science Center in Quantico. It looks like the owner of the car resisted and there was a struggle with the perpetrator, and during the struggle, the car owner wound up with a switchblade jammed under his ribs and into his liver. It severed an artery and he bled out before they could get him to the emergency room. In the same shopping center parking lot, officers discovered a car that had been stolen Thursday night in New Jersey. Gennaro Millientello's fingerprints were all over it."

"So now, this is a federal matter because it involves crimes in New Jersey and Virginia and a potential security issue here in South Carolina," the agent said. "This guy has killed a man and he knows he's got nothing to lose now because he'll do the rest of his life in prison after he's caught."

"Seems that way," Rance said. "How do we know he's targeting Gia?"

"Interviews with dozens of his fellow juvenile detainees at Pemberton," Deason said. "He talked about it constantly - his sick, violent fantasy about this girl at what he said was a 'big-shot, rich kids' college down south.' I'm not going to upset you all with exactly what he said but suffice it to say Miss Jones likely would not survive it and anyone in the way would be acceptable collateral damage to this guy."

Callie spoke up, her voice breaking. "Do you know how close he's gotten so far?"

The plainclothes South Carolina State Police detective, Bill Zanone, spoke up.

"They recovered the SUV taken in the fatal Virginia carjacking just across the North Carolina line near Roanoke Rapids. He'd tried to run it into Lake Gaston, but it ran into a tree. We don't know where he went from there: no reports yet of another stolen vehicle. But if he was able to get his hands on another car out in that rural part of the state that hasn't yet reported stolen, then, clearly, he could already be in the area," Zanone said.

"Doesn't he have a cell phone you can track?" Gia said.

"We believe he was using a cell phone his mom gave him for a few days after he got out of Pemberton, but he was smart enough to ditch it. That phone went dark three days ago. Odds are he's acquired a prepaid burner," Deason said. "If any of you get any communication you don't recognize on your cell phones, please report it to us immediately."

"Obviously, this has become a priority case now, as you can see," Captain Blanding said. "It's an active, multi-jurisdictional matter. In South Carolina, the governor himself has taken an interest because this touches on a Southeastern Conference football program and the potential for this to become huge national news is immense. So you're going to notice, if you haven't already, a lot more marked state units but there's also going to be a lot going on that you won't notice."

"At this time, we are not ready to go public with this, so we're going to ask you to keep this very confidential. We want you to continue with your normal routines but be very careful and vigilant. You will be under observation and protection at all times, whether you see it or not. But please don't try to sneak off or give us the slip," the captain said.

"This is a very troubled individual we're trying to capture here," the FBI agent said. "The Behavioral Unit in Quantico believes he's willing to die to carry out his twisted plan. As disturbing as that may be, we think it's important for you to realize."

Callie Jones was quietly weeping. Gia had her arms around her mother, trying to comfort her. Rance stood quietly, shaking his head as he struggled to take it all in.

Each of the officers handed a business card to Gia, Callie and Rance on their way out, encouraged them to put them in their phones immediately and make them speed-dial numbers so they could instantly report anything they believe is relevant.

"Well, now we know," Rance said to Gia and her trembling mother. "I appreciate their making this a high priority. But I don't understand why nobody in law enforcement in New Jersey notified y'all before they released this guy, knowing how disturbed he is."

"A lot I don't understand about New Jersey," Callie said, dismay dripping from each syllable.

Gia snuggled against her mother and rested her head on her shoulder, a move that seemed to comfort to Callie, who stroked her daughter's hair. And, for the first time since Rance had arrived at the Honors College, Callie smiled.

"But we're not in New Jersey," she said, kissing the top of Gia's head. "We gonna be fine."

●●●

"Whoa, look at this shit!" Gene Hurley called out to his roommate just as the two were about to head out for their 9 a.m. classes on Monday. "Wonder if this had anything to do with the cop car parked outside last night."

On the TV in the apartment, a local news cutaway from the "Today Show." A banner in the top left of the screen read "BREAKING NEWS" and the chyron in the bottom third of the frame read "NC COUPLE'S MURDER HAS SC TIE." In between, the youthful, blonde anchor for Columbia's NBC affiliate, in an urgent tone, was reporting that a pickup truck belonging to an elderly couple who were found slain in their home north of Durham, North Carolina, had been found abandoned about six miles east Fallstrom.

"Police are looking for this man, 18-year-old Gennaro Millientello, who was released last week from a juvenile detention center in New Jersey," the anchor said. On the screen was a mug shot of a boy with a thin face, hair with black roots that had recently been bleached almost white, a neck tattoo and eyes as dead as a doll's that registered no human feeling.

Rance felt his blood run cold and the pit of his stomach drop.

"Holy fuck...," he said.

"Rance, you know something about this," Hurley said in an urgent tone. "Is that why you ran out of here after curfew last night? Rance, what the fuck is going on?"

"Can't explain now, Gene. I gotta make some calls," he said.

Rance went into his car to make sure he couldn't be overheard and hit the speed-dial number for Captain Robert Blanding of the South Carolina State Police.

"Captain Blanding," the voice on the other end of the line answered on the first ring.

"Sir, this is Rance Martin. I thought we would be kept in the loop about this Geno Millions thing. I just saw his photo on TV with a story about a truck owned by a murdered old couple in North Carolina being found just outside of Fallstrom."

"Rance, we've got people watching your girlfriend and her mama, and we've increased the number of officers working this case, so she'll be OK. We just told them about what we learned," Blanding said.

"You just now informed them but it's all over TV already?" Rance said incredulously.

"I don't know how the press got their hands on this so fast. It wasn't us. I suspect those media whores at the Justice Department in D.C. But that's not the main thing right now. The main thing is keeping Miss Jones and her mom safe from this guy," the captain said. "Son, we're doing the best we can."

"Does the press know why he's down here? Do they know about Gia?" Rance pressed Blanding.

"My guess is they don't because they'd have led their story with it. Anything touching on a bigtime football program or a romantic angle sends them into overdrive. That would make it national news," Blanding said. "But I also suspect that it's only a matter of time before they find out, and so we're making plans right now for taking Miss Jones and her mom into protective custody and hiding them out to keep this from becoming a media circus and telegraphing her whereabouts to boot."