Re: Savannah/Nell
"Thought so," she said with a nod, then grinned. "And that's really what I do for a living, take pieces of information like dialect, education, religious background, and put them together to lead to other pieces of information, like state of birth. It is a lot of guesswork. But it's guesswork and deductions based on other verifiable facts. It's hypothesizing, really. And then the agents go out and test our hypothesis, add their own, and catch the bad guys -- we hope."
Smirking softly, she shrugged. "You'd know more about that than I would. I only know them in the office, where they're usually 'flim-flamming' each other, as Hetty would say."
Nell nodded at mention of the cell phones. "We use the phones all the time to keep in touch with the agents in the field. When I worked with OSP, Agents Callen or one of the others would use the phone to take pictures of people they needed to identify and send them to us immediately so we could get to work on that identification. If we found an important document or the location of a suspect, we'd send it to them directly. It's crucial for expediting information during the course of an investigation, especially in highly populated areas where traffic alone can mean the difference between apprehending a suspect or that suspect getting away. Or, during a dangerous op when identifying a tattoo might be the key to the agents undercover knowing how to speak to an individual.
"You're going to be in the field with them, right? You'll get used to the phone when you start having things to send us yourself, I'll bet."