Spitefic: Operation Twilight: Breakthrough
Title: Operation Twilight
Author: afterandalasia
Fandom(s): Twilight
Rating: R? Nothing graphic, but it doesn't seem PG-13 anymore...
Word Count: 1,878
Inspiration: Crime procedurals, and... something. Boom, serial killer!Cullens and undercover!Bella. This chapter includes Edward watching Bella in her sleep, and that infamous meadow scene.
Warnings: Discussion of serial killer practices, more detailed this time, and suggestion of cults. Descriptions of violence and reference to rape.
Summary: The string of murders has been going on for long enough. Charlie has been in deep cover to watch the Cullens, and now he's getting a partner to help take them down. And who would suspect a moody, clumsy highschooler of being a trained FBI operative who specialises in these sort of bait operations?
In part two, Charlie and Bella get the breakthrough that they're looking for.
Disclaimer: Twilight is most definitely not mine. My knowledge of police and FBI procedures is informed by the media as well as my own research, and I doubt that it's entirely accurate. But it is more fun.
Part One
Part Three
It took time, of course, for us to get the results that we were looking for.
The name of the game was always going to be time, and I'd been at this for years. Bella and I used the time to adapt to living in the same house, sharing keys and the driveway, discovering that her cooking far outstripped mine and, as she put it, she would rather have at least one thing she could be an adult in. Though I drew the line at lunchboxes to take to the station with me, I certainly wasn't going to complain.
It was about six weeks after Bella arrived, give or take, when she wandered downstairs still in her pyjamas, frowning, and said: "I think one of them was outside my room last night."
She hadn't reacted, hadn't wanted to trigger a response. Snapping on latex gloves, we dusted the sill for fingerprints, and I was disturbed when we found smudges along the ledge.
"How the hell did they get up here?" I couldn't help asking, trying to find any print that had enough of a ridge pattern still evident to be used.
"Probably the tree," said Bella, eyeing the maple outside the window. It had been with the house since long before I bought it, to judge by the size, and there was indeed a rather conveniently placed branched that a light enough person could shimmy out on before jumping across.
Fingerprints wouldn't get us anything more than trespass, even if there was something clear enough to view. But it was a start.
The next day, Bella informed me, Edward had spoken to her in the corridor for apparently the sole purpose of telling her not to talk to him. It was a frustrating flicker of what we were waiting for. She kept me up to date over the following days as he alternately spoke to her "with an amusingly pained expression" and avoided her like the plague. We couldn't help feeling some confidence that he was coming closer to becoming interested, closer to taking the bait that we were offering him.
A little over a week later, we got the biggest surprise of all, something which we had not been expecting:
A body.
We almost feared that it would be the category that we were placing Bella into: high school girl, brunette, isolated. We'd seen the trail of them across the country, generally one for each year, usually during this semester. Not just because it would be another body, but because the one-a-year rule would mean that Bella was wasting her time being in Forks at all. By next year, she'd seem too settled to be a target.
So if there was going to be a body turn up at al, it was good that it wasn't going to be that one. More than that, it was the first fresh body that we'd managed to find for years, and the first since we had an idea of what was going on.
"Female, approximately twenty five to thirty years of age," said Bella, flicking through the report as I opened up a map of the area on the table. "Caucasian, long blonde hair. Signs that she was heavily pregnant when she was taken, but her abdomen had been badly cut open and there was no sign of the foetus."
"How many weeks?"
"Third trimester. They're working on an identification now, and then we can get the records for sure. But yes, it will be viable. No sign of sexual assault means that it's not a crossover."
We'd had to coin the term for the disappearances that seemed to fall into more than one category. The first group, the ones that we found going back the furthest, were in hospitals. Carlisle Cullen did not have a patient death ratio much higher than the norm, but the deaths had a strange pattern to them. People either died quickly under him, or recovered quickly, either of them more quickly than would be expected. There was a high turnover, when we looked closely enough, a constancy to it.
The second group were these, the pregnant women. Foetuses removed, and so far no sign of the child, at any age, found. The time periods were all over the place, from two months up to eighteen, but the pattern was still there. Always at least one child at a time under the age of two. We had tried putting surveillance on the Cullens, but we could never get proof that there was a child on the premises.
The third, easily profiled: Bella's role.
The fourth, perhaps the classic serial killer deaths. A string of vanished women, of variable age, two found brutally raped with throats slit. One of them tortured as well, her hands sewn together and crosses carved into her skin.
All high-profile disappearances, apart from possibly the medical ones, and yet they were frustratingly hard to track. We had a grand total of four bodies - this one, and the three vicious deaths. We were hoping that it would get us a wider range of evidence, might manage to link more than one of the Cullens to death.
Bella flicked through a few more pages. "The blonde, Rosalie... she was seen paying a lot of attention outside a baby clothes shop not that long ago. Her web history is concerned with babies as well, but that seems to be a fairly long-term thing... looks like she's been obsessed with children for a while."
"Could be a link."
"I wonder if she's sterile," said Bella, apparently out of nowhere. I looked round with a frown. "It would explain the obsession... they said that there was a Marie-Rose Lee go missing in New York, six years ago, right? She was seventeen then, it would make her twenty-two now. The disappearances have been more frequent in the last five years, right?"
She had this habit of thinking aloud, I had discovered early on, and then of pausing and chewing on her lip whilst she mulled things over. We weren't sure who all of the Cullens really were -- couldn't find adoption records, and were struggling to match them with missing persons -- but of Rosalie we were the most sure.
"Yeah, though it's been going on for longer. They've been in Forks for just over a year and a half now, and the last missing person on a heavily pregnant woman was sixteen months ago. The time frame works."
For a moment, the sadness in Bella's eyes told of the lie that was the seventeen years that she claimed. Then it was gone, and she closed the folder and set it aside. "Then let's make sure that we catch them."
I watched, from a distance, as Edward Cullen drew slowly, ever so slowly, closer to Bella. Another three days, and we managed to get clean fingerprints from the windowsill, which we immediately sent off to IAFIS in the hope of identification. We didn't even have time to get a reply, however, when I came home after work one afternoon to find that Bella was not home.
I checked the fridge for a note, but there was nothing there. A text earnt no response, but there was no reason to panic, and I dialled her phone. It rang three times before she replied, breathless.
"Hey, Charlie."
"Everything okay, Bella?"
"Oh! Sorry about not leaving a note. I got a surprise invitation."
The word 'surprise' made something in my brain click. Bella was never surprised, not by anything. "Out with... friends?"
"Uh-huh. Group project for biology. A presentation." I heard her suppress a conspiratorial giggle. Yes, she was with Edward, and she was pretending that it was a chance for them to sneak away. 'Group project' meant that she was getting evidence on the Cullens, and 'presentation' meant that she was wearing a wire. Even without it, though, we had a good chance of getting a warrant on Bella's affadavit alone.
"Ah, all right. You planning to be home for dinner?"
There was a brief, whispered conversation on the far end. I waited it out as patiently as an oblivious father would. "Yeah, sure. Can we make it about seven?"
"Of course. See you then, honey."
"See you," she replied, with just a tinge of bubbly in-love teenager seeping through the moody exterior. Heavens, but the girl was good. Then she disconnected and, with a growing smile, I pocketed the phone and turned back to the kitchen. My cooking might not be as good as Bella's, but I had the occasional trick up my sleeve.
"He's declared that he's in love with me," said Bella casually over her steak. I almost choked. "Then he told me everything."
That helped my recovery a little. "Everything?"
"Well, his version of it," said Bella. She smiled, in a way that was just a little bit dangerous. "About him and his family. Apparently... they're vampires."
To that, I honestly did not have a good answer. There had been a long history of serial killers who believed they were vampires, who cannibalised their victims or consumed their flesh, and at least two groups of young adults who had similar stories, but it was hardly what I would have expected to hear.
"Carlisle is three hundred and forty years old," said Bella, "and he turned each of them so that they can join his family. They only feed on animals, he says, but..."
"Most vampires don't."
"Exactly. Which is why he is dangerous and shouldn't talk to me, and we should never be around each other."
"And?"
"He wants me to meet his family tomorrow."
I nodded thoughtfully, and had another swig of my beer. "I think I might nip round and meet the good family myself."
There are rules, of course, about warrants. All designed to protect the privacy of the innocent, and the police know how to work around them to catch the guilty. The one I was thinking of in this case was the 'in plain sight' rule: if I had a legitimate reason to be in a property, then anything in plain sight could be submitted as evidence, even seized if I felt the need.
The Cullens mostly kept to themselves, out in their fancy house on the edge of town. We weren't sure where the money came from, but then again we couldn't track down the name 'Cullen' either. Maybe it was family money, maybe some of those unsolved robberies were going to turn out to be a little more solved than we thought. It was still a lesser crime than the murders, though.
Edward texted Bella to check whether she was coming when we were about halfway there. She checked her phone, and promptly ignored it. Let him believe that she was driving there herself; she'd even let me drive the truck, so that the cruiser wouldn't be so obvious. Both of us needed to turn nervous excitement into the glee of a young girl meeting her boyfriend and her uncertain father.
I was just looking forward to the moment that they opened the door large enough for me to get one foot in. We'd got our breakthrough, and now all we needed was the final few pieces.
Author: afterandalasia
Fandom(s): Twilight
Rating: R? Nothing graphic, but it doesn't seem PG-13 anymore...
Word Count: 1,878
Inspiration: Crime procedurals, and... something. Boom, serial killer!Cullens and undercover!Bella. This chapter includes Edward watching Bella in her sleep, and that infamous meadow scene.
Warnings: Discussion of serial killer practices, more detailed this time, and suggestion of cults. Descriptions of violence and reference to rape.
Summary: The string of murders has been going on for long enough. Charlie has been in deep cover to watch the Cullens, and now he's getting a partner to help take them down. And who would suspect a moody, clumsy highschooler of being a trained FBI operative who specialises in these sort of bait operations?
In part two, Charlie and Bella get the breakthrough that they're looking for.
Disclaimer: Twilight is most definitely not mine. My knowledge of police and FBI procedures is informed by the media as well as my own research, and I doubt that it's entirely accurate. But it is more fun.
Part One
Part Three
It took time, of course, for us to get the results that we were looking for.
The name of the game was always going to be time, and I'd been at this for years. Bella and I used the time to adapt to living in the same house, sharing keys and the driveway, discovering that her cooking far outstripped mine and, as she put it, she would rather have at least one thing she could be an adult in. Though I drew the line at lunchboxes to take to the station with me, I certainly wasn't going to complain.
It was about six weeks after Bella arrived, give or take, when she wandered downstairs still in her pyjamas, frowning, and said: "I think one of them was outside my room last night."
She hadn't reacted, hadn't wanted to trigger a response. Snapping on latex gloves, we dusted the sill for fingerprints, and I was disturbed when we found smudges along the ledge.
"How the hell did they get up here?" I couldn't help asking, trying to find any print that had enough of a ridge pattern still evident to be used.
"Probably the tree," said Bella, eyeing the maple outside the window. It had been with the house since long before I bought it, to judge by the size, and there was indeed a rather conveniently placed branched that a light enough person could shimmy out on before jumping across.
Fingerprints wouldn't get us anything more than trespass, even if there was something clear enough to view. But it was a start.
The next day, Bella informed me, Edward had spoken to her in the corridor for apparently the sole purpose of telling her not to talk to him. It was a frustrating flicker of what we were waiting for. She kept me up to date over the following days as he alternately spoke to her "with an amusingly pained expression" and avoided her like the plague. We couldn't help feeling some confidence that he was coming closer to becoming interested, closer to taking the bait that we were offering him.
A little over a week later, we got the biggest surprise of all, something which we had not been expecting:
A body.
We almost feared that it would be the category that we were placing Bella into: high school girl, brunette, isolated. We'd seen the trail of them across the country, generally one for each year, usually during this semester. Not just because it would be another body, but because the one-a-year rule would mean that Bella was wasting her time being in Forks at all. By next year, she'd seem too settled to be a target.
So if there was going to be a body turn up at al, it was good that it wasn't going to be that one. More than that, it was the first fresh body that we'd managed to find for years, and the first since we had an idea of what was going on.
"Female, approximately twenty five to thirty years of age," said Bella, flicking through the report as I opened up a map of the area on the table. "Caucasian, long blonde hair. Signs that she was heavily pregnant when she was taken, but her abdomen had been badly cut open and there was no sign of the foetus."
"How many weeks?"
"Third trimester. They're working on an identification now, and then we can get the records for sure. But yes, it will be viable. No sign of sexual assault means that it's not a crossover."
We'd had to coin the term for the disappearances that seemed to fall into more than one category. The first group, the ones that we found going back the furthest, were in hospitals. Carlisle Cullen did not have a patient death ratio much higher than the norm, but the deaths had a strange pattern to them. People either died quickly under him, or recovered quickly, either of them more quickly than would be expected. There was a high turnover, when we looked closely enough, a constancy to it.
The second group were these, the pregnant women. Foetuses removed, and so far no sign of the child, at any age, found. The time periods were all over the place, from two months up to eighteen, but the pattern was still there. Always at least one child at a time under the age of two. We had tried putting surveillance on the Cullens, but we could never get proof that there was a child on the premises.
The third, easily profiled: Bella's role.
The fourth, perhaps the classic serial killer deaths. A string of vanished women, of variable age, two found brutally raped with throats slit. One of them tortured as well, her hands sewn together and crosses carved into her skin.
All high-profile disappearances, apart from possibly the medical ones, and yet they were frustratingly hard to track. We had a grand total of four bodies - this one, and the three vicious deaths. We were hoping that it would get us a wider range of evidence, might manage to link more than one of the Cullens to death.
Bella flicked through a few more pages. "The blonde, Rosalie... she was seen paying a lot of attention outside a baby clothes shop not that long ago. Her web history is concerned with babies as well, but that seems to be a fairly long-term thing... looks like she's been obsessed with children for a while."
"Could be a link."
"I wonder if she's sterile," said Bella, apparently out of nowhere. I looked round with a frown. "It would explain the obsession... they said that there was a Marie-Rose Lee go missing in New York, six years ago, right? She was seventeen then, it would make her twenty-two now. The disappearances have been more frequent in the last five years, right?"
She had this habit of thinking aloud, I had discovered early on, and then of pausing and chewing on her lip whilst she mulled things over. We weren't sure who all of the Cullens really were -- couldn't find adoption records, and were struggling to match them with missing persons -- but of Rosalie we were the most sure.
"Yeah, though it's been going on for longer. They've been in Forks for just over a year and a half now, and the last missing person on a heavily pregnant woman was sixteen months ago. The time frame works."
For a moment, the sadness in Bella's eyes told of the lie that was the seventeen years that she claimed. Then it was gone, and she closed the folder and set it aside. "Then let's make sure that we catch them."
I watched, from a distance, as Edward Cullen drew slowly, ever so slowly, closer to Bella. Another three days, and we managed to get clean fingerprints from the windowsill, which we immediately sent off to IAFIS in the hope of identification. We didn't even have time to get a reply, however, when I came home after work one afternoon to find that Bella was not home.
I checked the fridge for a note, but there was nothing there. A text earnt no response, but there was no reason to panic, and I dialled her phone. It rang three times before she replied, breathless.
"Hey, Charlie."
"Everything okay, Bella?"
"Oh! Sorry about not leaving a note. I got a surprise invitation."
The word 'surprise' made something in my brain click. Bella was never surprised, not by anything. "Out with... friends?"
"Uh-huh. Group project for biology. A presentation." I heard her suppress a conspiratorial giggle. Yes, she was with Edward, and she was pretending that it was a chance for them to sneak away. 'Group project' meant that she was getting evidence on the Cullens, and 'presentation' meant that she was wearing a wire. Even without it, though, we had a good chance of getting a warrant on Bella's affadavit alone.
"Ah, all right. You planning to be home for dinner?"
There was a brief, whispered conversation on the far end. I waited it out as patiently as an oblivious father would. "Yeah, sure. Can we make it about seven?"
"Of course. See you then, honey."
"See you," she replied, with just a tinge of bubbly in-love teenager seeping through the moody exterior. Heavens, but the girl was good. Then she disconnected and, with a growing smile, I pocketed the phone and turned back to the kitchen. My cooking might not be as good as Bella's, but I had the occasional trick up my sleeve.
"He's declared that he's in love with me," said Bella casually over her steak. I almost choked. "Then he told me everything."
That helped my recovery a little. "Everything?"
"Well, his version of it," said Bella. She smiled, in a way that was just a little bit dangerous. "About him and his family. Apparently... they're vampires."
To that, I honestly did not have a good answer. There had been a long history of serial killers who believed they were vampires, who cannibalised their victims or consumed their flesh, and at least two groups of young adults who had similar stories, but it was hardly what I would have expected to hear.
"Carlisle is three hundred and forty years old," said Bella, "and he turned each of them so that they can join his family. They only feed on animals, he says, but..."
"Most vampires don't."
"Exactly. Which is why he is dangerous and shouldn't talk to me, and we should never be around each other."
"And?"
"He wants me to meet his family tomorrow."
I nodded thoughtfully, and had another swig of my beer. "I think I might nip round and meet the good family myself."
There are rules, of course, about warrants. All designed to protect the privacy of the innocent, and the police know how to work around them to catch the guilty. The one I was thinking of in this case was the 'in plain sight' rule: if I had a legitimate reason to be in a property, then anything in plain sight could be submitted as evidence, even seized if I felt the need.
The Cullens mostly kept to themselves, out in their fancy house on the edge of town. We weren't sure where the money came from, but then again we couldn't track down the name 'Cullen' either. Maybe it was family money, maybe some of those unsolved robberies were going to turn out to be a little more solved than we thought. It was still a lesser crime than the murders, though.
Edward texted Bella to check whether she was coming when we were about halfway there. She checked her phone, and promptly ignored it. Let him believe that she was driving there herself; she'd even let me drive the truck, so that the cruiser wouldn't be so obvious. Both of us needed to turn nervous excitement into the glee of a young girl meeting her boyfriend and her uncertain father.
I was just looking forward to the moment that they opened the door large enough for me to get one foot in. We'd got our breakthrough, and now all we needed was the final few pieces.