Some days you make wordcount, and some days you do not.
As usual, David took the opportunity to jump in. The man purely hated uncomfortable silences. “We still need to think about how to push things if we don’t get results right away. I know Oversight doesn’t want us breaking regs. How much slack can we get from stretching them, Observer?”
“The regs are there for a reason,” Cartwright muttered. Then she looked at the printout again. “But people are disappearing… look, you can’t make anybody vanish either, okay? No rough stuff, definitely nothing permanent. We have authorizations to bring people in for questioning, and the judge gave more leeway than he should’ve about who we could use those authorizations on.” She sighed. “But he did, so it’s legal if we pull suspects off the street.”
“Or if we sound like we’re gonna start pulling ‘em,” Norm noted. “Back in the day, sometimes all you needed to do to get a poutine to talk was dump him in the Room and let him stew. And those were hardass secessionists, even when they weren’t cultists. A bunch of Old State normies won’t be that tough. I say we let our reputation do the heavy lifting on this one.”
“I agree with both of you.” David flashed a grin. “Sorry. We may need to push, Observer Cartwright, regulations or not. But North Jersey ain’t Wendigo Country, Agent Baker. The folks around here had to… adjust less to the new rules.”