10:04 AM.  Jonas clicked the pocket watch shut, and then shifted impatiently, glancing at the very short woman waiting impassively next to him.

There was, he had to admit, an unarguable logic in Tamis's strong recommendation that he not go through this process alone.  Adon was still at St. Mungo's, kept in a potion-induced state of unconsciousness.  The memory of his partner, gray and bleeding and looking nearly dead as he lay defeated on the pavement outside the Ministry, made the urge to strangle someone much harder to resist than it might normally be.  But Jonas was determined.  He was single-minded.  He was professional.  He was not going to murder anyone today however much he might like to, and he would get what he needed out of this basket case of an assassin even if he had to yank it out of her, piece by piece, by extracting it with her own bloody fingernails.

Not that he was taking this personally at all. 

This wasn't personal.  It was business.

Jonas drummed his fingers on the file-folder tucked under his arm, wondering momentarily if arranging to leave a rotting horse head in someone's bed made the situation more or less personal, and silently counted to thirty.  At twenty three, he checked the pocket watch again.  Even seven seconds short, the count had been enough.  The minute hand clicked over.  10:05 AM. 

"That's five minutes," he informed Tamis needlessly, clicking it closed for the umpteenth time as he finally returned it to his pocket.  This wasn't personal.  Even wanting to strangle suspects didn't make it personal; it just made it a very forceful interrogation.  "Should be enough time for the Veritaserum to set in, yeah?"

Even after spending the past twenty-four hours tearing through law enforcement records, Jonas suspected that he had only begun to scratch the surface of the assassin's apparently considerable record.  Metamorphs were, luckily, few and far between, and it hadn't taken long to get what he felt was a fairly likely match.  Once he had an inkling, dogged determination had driven the rest of the night as he'd worked straight into the early hours of the morning.

The interrogation room was clean, empty save for the heavy metal table that sat in the center.  Their assassin was positioned on one side of it, already dressed in the threadbare gray robes that were issued to prisoners of the Ministry.  In her natural form, the woman didn't look to be any bigger than Tamis; she looked to be in her mid-fifties, with streaks of gray beginning to show in her dark hair and small, nicked scars covering what they could see of her body.  She had been manacled hand and foot, the chains enchanted to prevent against escape and to stop the woman from changing her form as she had during the fight with Adon.  Jonas gave her a perfectly friendly, entirely polite smile, holding the door open for Tamis behind him before he strode into the room.

"Alright, then?" he greeted the woman cheerfully, pulling out a chair to take a seat.  Unfortunately, her overnight stay in St. Mungo's hadn't left their assassin too visibly worse for wear.  At this rate, even despite her injuries, the woman had probably gotten more sleep than he had, although Jonas was willing to put down money that he was light years ahead in the running-on-adrenaline department. 

The red-haired Auror cleared his throat, keeping his eyes set on the Metamorph as he settled in the chair.  "Hope you've slept alright?  I'm afraid the accommodations probably won't get much better, but I trust you've enjoyed them whilst you could," he informed her amicably, setting the file folder down on the table in front of him.  Professional.  Not personal.  This was business.  "Sorry about that bit with the car, by the way.  It's always impressive how easy it is to get carried away once you're in the heat of the moment, innit?"

As if the humiliation of getting caught wasn't enough, these Aurors had the audacity not only to bind her abilities, but to douse her with Veritaserum. Her grey hair was showing. She'd barely realized she had any! They hadn't even let her take care of her hair, or put on makeup. This was simply barbaric.

Jonas got a cold-hearted, but entirely heartfelt glare as he and Tamis entered. The silly little man was cheerful, and she found herself very much looking forward to wiping that cheeky grin from his face. A few blows to the face and some torture was worth it to piss off these pathetic dogs - especially the cowardly ones.

"I slept very well indeed, Jonas," she said, glare turning to a practiced and charming smile - though it rather resembled the sort of smile that approached drowning sailors. With a fin on top. "Your hospital and its staff are simply charming! I'm sure...Adon, is it? Is enjoying his stay - the pretty nurses do seem to pay his needs special attention."

Though her feet and hands might be chained to the chair, she relaxed into a position of ease, tucking one hand under her chin, head tilted to the side slightly. "Get carried away? Yes, I suppose it is," she said, her blue eyes sharply narrowing for a just a moment. Prideaux...

"Still, I'm sure your friends will be grateful you chose to change your mind about running away," she added, with a sneer.

With her hands clasped loosely behind her back, the Head Auror watched the prisoner through the one-way enchanted glass, the epiphany of calm and detached. The same could not be said for the red-headed man standing besides her, fidgeting and checking his watch every 5 seconds. She pretended not to notice, gray eyes locked on the dark contrast of Azorma Hyskos in the white stone interior. The woman was small – could not weigh much more than herself –but Tamis Raynor would be the last to underestimate an individual based on size.

Her outward cool aloofness was entirely for her companion’s benefit. Beneath it a fire was gently simmering, given enough heat to complicate the petite Auror. Her anger in no way compared to the ferocity that Jonas Trevelyan believed he was masking (to another it might have been, but she knew better) but she carefully concealed any element of it. Adon Eleor was one of her men, but he had also gone down doing his job. This assassin had likewise been doing her job. Being able to rationalize that point did not mean she had to sympathize with it.

Her gaze sidled over to Jonas as he spoke, snapping his pocket watch closed for a decisively final time. “Do not count on it to work,” she reminded him simply but with an underlying gentility, “We do not know if she is an Occlumens.” The truth potion was best used against the unsuspecting but was fallible in many ways. Overcoming it with Occlumency had been one of the first tricks Tamis Raynor discovered during the Second War. But overdosing a suspect who was as good as incarcerated anyway never hurt. However useless in for court room evidence.

Entering the interrogation room without further comment, Raynor barely spared the attempted murderer a glance as she moved not toward the lone metal table, but an adjacent wall. Crossing her arms, she leaned against it without slouching; maintaining her uncanny posture as Trevelyan “cheerfully” greeted the future inmate.

Expectantly, Hyskos rose to bait the newest addition to the Auror Corps. The Head Auror remained silently disinterested, eyes not flickering to gage Jonas’ reaction however much they wanted to. Jonas deserved to control this interrogation as much as he needed to, even if he would not admit it. Raynor understood that need, but however much she trusted the man’s character this was not something she had been about to let him go into alone. Nor any of her Aurors. His personal attachment to the Runespoor Investigation was as strong as her own and his partner was still critical in St. Mungos.

 She was not sure if she was here to protect Jonas from Hykos or Hykos from Jonas. But she loitered on.

The use of his first name threw him for an instant.  A beat later, Jonas realized that it probably shouldn't have; clearly, the woman had done her homework on them before approaching the telephone booth.  She'd correctly identified Dreogan as a disguise that would get under their guard, had been able to mimic the mage's mannerisms well enough to trick Adon into getting close.  As much as they thought they'd been keeping surveillance on Mulogo, she had obviously been doing the same to them, and neither he nor Adon had noticed.

To be fair, they hadn't expected a Metamorphmagus, though that wasn't a mistake that Jonas was going to make twice.  She was straining now, using what she obviously knew about him to try and bait him.  Such a trick might work on Adon.  He was determined that it wouldn't on him.

The Auror gave her a polite, humorless smile in return, holding the woman's gaze for a moment longer than he normally would.  "Yeah, lucky for them I got all of that out of me system ten years ago," he said lightly, resting a hand on the file folder.  "It was a right proper struggle, though.  One more sneer in me direction and you would've sent me racing down the street."

Restraining the sudden urge to whistle, he opened the folder, letting it lay flat on the table in front of him.  Page by page, he began to flip through it, keeping his movements sure and unhurried as he scanned over the file contents.

"You want to get a couple more digs in before we get going, Atalana?" he asked conversationally, pausing to inspect each piece of parchment as he came to it.  St. Mungo's records from almost twenty years before.  Copies of a banking record.  A newspaper clipping.  "The knee's a pretty good one; I'm still a bit sore over that.  Oh, or Aldridge," he offered helpfully, flashing her a quick smile as he picked up something that looked to be written in Italian.  "Threatening the family's gotten a tad old, but I reckon you could come up with a new take on it, what with the Metamorph bit and all.  Just let me know when you're done, yeah?"

"Oh, if you insist," she told him, sneer remaining intact. "Thank you for the tip about your family. Once I escape, I'll have to drop by," she said, voice changing to a good imitation of Jonas's. "Meet the wife. Show 'er a good time - bet you've been too busy lately to get on that, yeah? She might be real grateful."

She crossed her legs - as much as she could, at least. She made a show of looking around the bare room and sniffed. "Such a dull setting. Not even a vase of flowers! And you two aren't exactly easy on the eyes, either - I should have attacked you, so Adon would have to question me," she licked her lips and shook her hips ever so slightly, showing what she meant. "I wouldn't mind having him pump me for information, no sir."

All at once her face went deadly serious and her position relaxed to a buisnesslike pose. "Good enough? Now, shall we get on with this buisness? I'm sure you and your..." She glanced at Tamis. "Your lovely friend want to hear me confess everything."

"Well, we're divorced, so I don't know that 'grateful' would be the proper word for it," Jonas replied cheerfully, flashing her a quick smile as he picked up the file folder.  "But if you find something that works, you'll have to let me know, yeah?  Give me enough of a hand with the marriage counseling and I might be willing to include it in your plea bargain."

He continued to flip through the folder, idly scanning over the documents until he got to a blank piece of parchment.  Most Level Two interrogations were magically recorded as a point of procedure, but there was something to be said for taking his own notes.  Even if it didn't actually convey any more information, it had its uses even as something idle to do.  Atalana Kanika, or Azorma Hyskos, or whatever name the woman preferred to go by didn't seem likely to break under the pure penetrating force of his angry glare.  If he was going to get any useful information out of her in the near future, it was going to have to come through other means.

He pulled out a pen and uncapped it, testing the ink by scribbling on the page as he listened to the woman prattle on.  Houdini as a more desirable interrogator -- Jonas lost his composure long enough to let out a snort.  In any other circumstances, he would have burst out laughing.  Hell, in most other circumstances, he would have volunteered to donate one or two of the hundred-plus copies of the Witch Weekly article that he still had hidden in an unused drawer of Dean Bailey's desk, but volunteering Adon as eye candy to the woman who had just nearly killed him seemed inherently wrong, as funny as it might be.

"Naw, actually, we've got you pretty good on the 'attempting to murder a Magical Law Enforcement officer' charge," he assured Hyskos easily, as he began to idly record notes.  "The whole hitting-you-with-a-car bit and all.  But if you want to talk, have at it."

She rolled her eyes - she was beginning to think Adon would have been a genuinely better interrogator than Jonas, just based on the fact he wasn't likely to be a serial staller. Maybe all this waiting and dragging his feet was supposed to make her nervous or angry; it might be succeeding a bit on the second point, but that was more annoyance than anger.

"Can't say I'm feeling very talkative today," she said simply. "But since you've got me so good, I suppose that means we're done here?" She made a show of checking a watch, though she wasn't wearing one.