Midday Clouds - The Charlie Swan Story

Chapter 51 (Eclipse 10)

The dial tone, curiously and abruptly, stopped halfway through the first ring.

"Sergeant Smith's office," A female receptionist greeted me in an tone that demanded urgency.

"Hey, well, this is Chief Charles Swan calling. From Forks. Washington," I added sheepishly.

"Hold a moment."

I sat in the station's break room idly thumbing a pen while the smooth jazz droned through the phone's speaker. It had taken me three attempts that morning to finally make the damn call, and I was just now realizing that I probably should have prepared what I was going to say. It had been rattling around in my head overnight and on the drive over, but a few notes on a pad of paper would have done wonders to set my mind at ease. I'd just started placing the first dotted bullet onto paper when the distant, yet familiar, voice crackled through on the other end of the line.

"Smith here," was all he said. No 'Hello Charlie,' or 'sorry your friend died on a mission I put in motion,' but I supposed that was all written out in the letter he'd left me and that I'd summarily disposed of (burned).

"Hey, this is Charlie. Swan. From Forks. Figured it was about time I gave this cell a try."

"I'm glad to see that you've gotten it working, and have it on you. Is that all?"

"Well, no. I know you told me in that letter you left to update you on the happenings of any, as you put it, 'recently arrived residents' to Forks. Well, I've got good reason to believe that some suspicious behavior has indeed been happening."

"What have you learned?" Smith asked. His answers (or, so far, questions) had been brisque and curt, that of a man who always seemed to have somewhere else to be, someone else to see.

"...A good deal," I said, intentionally drawing out the silences between question and answer. "But there's still a lot I'm in the dark about over here, as I'm sure you're well aware of, and it's not exactly the kind of position a police chief is comfortable being in. So I'm hoping you've got just as many answers as questions, sergeant."

A long pause on the other end of the line, only the faint crackle of cables stretching from Forks to wherever-the-hell-he-might-be and back confirming the call hadn't been dropped.

"What is it you want to know?" He finally asked.

"Everything."

"You're not authorized to know everything."

Now it was my turn to sit in baffled silence. How deep did this go? I'd initially assumed that Smith was some hotshot detective from Seattle, but given the pull he seemed to have in regards to resources, manpower, and decision-making, I'd begun to suspect he belonged to a larger org. The FBI, maybe, or something military. He went by "Sergeant" after all.

"Okay. What am I authorized to know?"

"Anything that you discover on your own fruition, Chief. But that flow of info can't go downwards, it only goes up."

So he wasn't going to divulge anything, and expected me to tell him everything? Sure, he was definitely higher than me in the pecking order, but he wasn't my boss. So far as I was concerned, my boss was Forks Mayor Nedra Reed. And I hadn't heard a peep from her for months.

"...But what I can do for you, Charlie," Smith said, breaking the long pause, "is either confirm or deny any information that you may have discovered on your own."

"So," I finally answered, "if I were to say that I discovered that the Cullens, and specifically Carlisle, appear to be embedded in a dangerous – potentially criminal – sort of world, you would say...?"

"Affirmative. What drew you to those conclusions?"

"It's not a hard line to draw, Smith. The money, the power, the secrecy... it's more than you'd expect from any small town doctor, that's for sure."

"But why now? They've been living in your town for years now, no?"

"I've been having a more, let's call it 'personal' relationship with one of the kids. Edward. He's dating my daughter. He's over at my place every weeknight. It's hard not to notice he's not exactly a normal kid. I've had my suspicions that he doesn't just know about what his dad gets up to – he's actively a part of it."

Silence from Smith's end.

"Well, confirm or deny?"

"Neither. But you're on the right track, Chief. What led you to suspecting the boy?"

"The other night, he seemed to have an idea of what was going on in Seattle, with the latest string of murders. More than just that he had read the paper – like he knew exactly what was going on over there. That, and my kid, Bella, she took off to Italy to meet up with him a few months back. Seemed he was in some sort of trouble out there. Bella and one of the other Cullen kids, the girl, Alice, they took off without telling me. Got me thinking what kind of trouble some 18-year-old kid could get into in Florence, of all places."

"Ah," Smith said, as though a realization had just hit him. "You've done a great job here, Chief, so I'll leave you with this – your Bella likely wouldn't have spent her trip to Italy perusing the Duomo. I'll leave it at that."

"Well what a damn minute-" I said, angered at the lack of confirmation from his end, but like a sharp axe to a dry log, the line was cut.

I slammed the flip phone shut with an unsatisfyingly quiet click and slumped back into my chair. So the Cullens were, in fact, dangerously embroiled in the criminal underworld. Great. Nice to have that confirmed, but it wasn't like I hadn't been operating under that assumption for months now. This whole thing with Smith felt like a bad deal – that I was giving more than getting back. The Duomo? What did that cathedral have to do with jack?

I let myself breath for a moment, that old trick Billy had taught me back when I was in the depths of despair. Bella obviously wouldn't have spent much time sightseeing, given the emergency of it all, so why would he say that? ...Unless he meant that Bella hadn't spent any significant time in Florence at all, and that it had just been the closest airport to wherever it was she was actually going? I popped back over to my desk and pulled up the web browser. Unsure what to search and doubting we had a paper copy of the region, I pulled up Google Maps, which had thankfully been cooked up by some IT whiz last year. It was slow, but I eventually got it hovering over Florence, Italy, with the surrounding region populated by cities and towns I'd never heard of. I set up a 60 mile radius around Florence, figuring that anything outside that radius would likely be quicker served by a different major airport, and began making an alphabetized list of regions. There were about 50 all told, from Agliana to Volterra, and I spent the better part of that morning searching up missing person statistics, crime rates, and any (English) news articles I could possibly find that might hint at significant organized crime in the area. Three hours into the search, I'd crossed off 10 of them, had some tentative information for three, and had made my way down to the Gs, ending on Galeata, a small comune of about 2,500 people that seemed sleepy enough to definitively cross off the list.

I'd just begun closing my eyes for a break when my cell rang. It wasn't the new flip phone I'd been speaking with Smith on that sent me off on this wild goose chase, it was my old trusty brick, which meant it could only be friends or family calling me during work hours.

"Yeah?" I answered, too tired for any sense of decorum.

"Charlie!" A deep, booming voice laughed over the line. "I'd expect the sass from most white cops, but not you!"

It was Billy Black on the other end of the line.