Portkey in 20

It was at this rather inconvenient moment that Mr Potter sauntered, once again un-handcuffed, through the door in question, only to startle at all of the agents standing around outside. After an impressively fast recovery, he plastered his usual smirk on his face and asked the question he rather desperately needed answering.

“Excuse me gentlemen, ladies, but I was wondering; could someone please point me in the direction of the lavatories? I’m afraid I have rather been caught short”

Harry suddenly found himself with six guns pointed directly at him, and he internally sighed. For once, he actually wasn’t being snarky - he genuinely just needed a wee. He had considered the possibility of peeing where he was, and simply vanishing it behind him, but even he had some hygiene standards, and he had never tried to banish his own piss wandlessly before (that said he was very skilled at that type of spell usually, he had a 1-year-old baby at home, banishing and cleaning spells had been his salvation since the birth).

“Morgan, please escort our… guest to the restroom and bring him back when he’s done”

The guns all slowly lowered as Morgan grabbed Harry by the arm so tightly it began to ache.

“You’d better not try anything this time” he snarled, dragging Harry off to finally relieve himself.

Meanwhile, in a hotel in Washington D.C, Neville Longbottom was getting increasingly concerned. He had returned to their latest crime scene, after it had been confirmed that the one survivor would live, only to find it crawling with muggle Please-Men. He promptly disapparated, without being noticed thankfully, and returned to the hotel room, where he still was. It had been nearly four hours, and he had heard nothing from Harry. As far as he could imagine, this was the conclusion of one of two scenarios: he had either been captured by the killers, or by the muggles. Neville decided that it was probably the latter, given that the killers in question were more the wham-bang-down-you-clang killers, as opposed to hostage takers. This was both a blessing and a curse; blessing as muggles weren’t going to kill him (probably), but a curse because it was still impeding their investigation dramatically, not to mention the unfair amount of paperwork it was going to end in.

It was at this convenient moment that he received a patronus from Hermione, explaining the situation, as despite the pregnancy hormones, she had still been the only person to consider the fact that Neville would be none-the-wiser to what had happened. Neville grunted, this wasn’t an ideal situation, but he could certainly work with it, and luckily Ron was coming over to sort things out (on his wife’s behalf, she was eight months pregnant and didn’t fancy portkeying half the way around the world as such), which meant that he could continue investigating until such a time as Harry would be able to rejoin him. With that, he decided to look into their potential suspects, from the list of squibs they had previously obtained from MACUSA. The males were as follows: Apollo Castinetti - 38, Moureno Mage - 36,  Joseph Wright - 33,  Edgar Shortsnout - 30,  Zebedee Midas - 27,  Karsten Schrödinger - 24, and Cassius Mouran - 21.  Neville’s intuition had him discarding Joseph Wright immediately - that sort of name suggested that the family had close relations with muggles, if not from muggle descent themselves. Karsten Schrödinger could also be ruled out, as he had migrated to his family’s native land of Germany 15 years ago, and there was no record of him returning since. Apollo Castinetti was the next to go, as he had been raised in a muggle neighbourhood, and records showed him as having a muggle wife and two muggle children. Another that could be ruled out, was Moureno Mage, as he was in fact dead. He should have been the first to go really, but Neville’s mind was elsewhere. That just left Edgar Shortsnout, Zebedee Midas and Cassius Mouran. Neville sighed, before apparating to MACUSA headquarters to explore the records, and try and work out which of these men it could be.

Back in Quantico, Derek Morgan was dragging a smirking Potter back into the interview room, and wrestling him into yet another set of handcuffs. It had been decided that Morgan should stay in the room with him for the time being, in order to prevent another escape attempt. Meanwhile, Hotch sat down across a table from Reid, having placed a coffee gently in front of his friend.

“Reid… I think we need to have a talk”

No response.

“Is there anything you want to share with me?”

“I’m not going crazy, Hotch, I’m not. I think this case is maybe just… getting to me, you know?”

Hotch sighed, this would not be easy, for him or his friend. He decided it would be best to just be blunt.

“Reid, have you been developing symptoms of schizophrenia recently?”

Spencer could hold it in no longer, and his eyes began to fill with tears, which he angrily blinked back, and he admitted his truth to Hotch.

“It only started today, I swear Hotch, it doesn’t have to be permanent… Maybe I’m just tired, or… or overworked or something”

Hotch sighed, this was awful. He didn’t want to say to Reid what he was about to say… but he had to. It simply wasn’t safe not to.

“Reid… I’m going to book you an urgent appointment with the Bureau psychiatrist…. They will advise us as to how to go from there”

Spencer looked up from where he had been staring at his hands, his tears finally spilling past his eyes.

“Am I going to be fired, Hotch?”

“I don’t know Reid, it depends on what the psychiatrist says”

Deep within the record vaults of MACUSA HQ, Neville Longbottom was searching frantically through the information he had been granted access to. He was fairly certain that Zebedee Midas could be ruled out, as he was the only heir to his alchemist father, and seemed quite content to live a private life sitting on his multi-billion gallon inheritance. Now there were only two. He decided it would be best to visit them in their homes, to see what they could find. Unfortunately, Aurors weren’t supposed to confront suspects without backup, and Harry was AWOL; fortunately, Neville had been a Gryffindor, the slayer of Nagini (with the sword of Godric himself), so he thought he could ask a few questions on his own. It also helped that a squib raised as a reject of his magical parents would be unlikely to recognise the uniform of a member of the British Auror Squad. With that in mind, he made his decision, and apparated about half a block away from the home address of one Edgar Shortsnout.

Knock Knock

Who could that be? Edgar walked to the front door of his house tiredly and opened it to see a man, clearly a wizard judging by the outfit, standing outside patiently.

“May I help you?”

“Yes, my name is Neville Longbottom and…”

“Longbottom? Grammy knew of them… British Aristocracy aren’t they?”

Neville smiled politely, and decided to use this to his advantage.

“Yes sir, uhm, may I come in”

“Oh, yes of course sir, is it my fiancée you wanted to see?”

“Your fiancée?”

“Yes, Melania, she won’t be back for another month I’m afraid, it’s still the middle of semester you see”

“She’s a teacher?”

“Yes, at Ilvermorny… I’m sorry, it wasn’t her you wanted to see?”

The cogs turned in Neville’s head, this man was engaged to a witch, he couldn’t have malice towards the magical community.

“No, no nevermind. I’m sorry to bother you, I’ll just be going”

And with that he went towards the front door, tripping over a table leg in his haste, before finally disapparating where he was with a ‘pop’ leaving a confused Mr Shortsnout staring at the spot in which his mysterious guest had previously been standing. He shook his head with a sad smile, and muttered something along the lines of  ‘much more sexy when Mel does it’ before returning to the task he had been half way through when he had been disturbed.

Neville returned to the hotel triumphantly. He knew the name of their first killer.