Criminal Minds/The Big Bang Theory Fic: Witless Interrogation
Title: Witless Interrogation
Author: jujuberry136
Rating: PG-13
Pairing: Gen
Fandoms: Criminal Minds/The Big Bang Theory
Word Count: 2,075
Summary: “I’m Special Agent Morgan from the FBI, is Howard Wolowitz in?”
“I told you someone was going to catch on to your pornography habit,” an accented voice hissed from inside the apartment. “I told you! See if I visit you when you’re somebody’s bitch in the big house.”
Author’s Notes: Follows from Reunion, but not necessary to read to understand this (though it’d probably help). Thanks to ambrosia4all for the beta (and for pushing for more tackling) and for all the lovely reviews of “Reunion,” which inspired this sequel.
~*~*~*~*~*~
Morgan growled as he got back into the SUV.
“The witness was that bad?” Reid asked curiously, chewing on a Rice Krispies treat bar while studying the file in his lap intently.
“Didn’t get a chance to talk to him,” Morgan replied, pulling back into traffic. “His mother said since it’s Friday he’s at a friend’s house, something about Chinese food and old video games.”
“So where we going?”
“Apartment complex near the university, and no offense man, but I need a little silence.”
Reid raised an eyebrow curiously.
“The mother was a little… loud,” Morgan explained. “Pretty much shouted at me from the kitchen the entire time I was there. Her voice… let’s just say I feel for the guy.”
Reid nodded and thankfully let the silence continue until they got to the apartment complex ten minutes later. “Hey, I know this place.”
“Really?”
Reid nodded. “Yeah, a friend of mine lives here. I hung out with him and his friends for an evening the last time we were in L.A.”
“Really? You guys hit up any good clubs? Get caught making out with another actress by the paparazzi?” Morgan grinned as Reid swung at him irritably.
Reid pushed the call buttons for all of the apartments viciously. “Not really my scene-or theirs. We hung out and watched some Doctor Who dvds, then JJ picked me up in the morning in time for our flight.”
“Exciting,” Morgan replied flatly.
“Sorry, the buzzers haven’t worked in ages,” a voice said perkily from behind him. He turned around to find a smiling gorgeous blonde. From her frank appraisal, she liked what she saw as much as he did.
He noticed the keys in her hand. “Thanks for the info,” he replied, smiling broadly and taking off his sunglasses. ”Any chance you could let us in? We’re with the FBI.”
“Wow,” the girl replied, “that’s so cool. What are you doing here, Agent…?”
“Special Agent Derek Morgan,” he filled in. “And this is Special Agent-“
“Reid?” the girl gasped, then ran forward and gave him a big hug. What was it with that boy and blondes?
“Penny!” Reid replied after getting his breath back. “It’s so good to see you again, how are you doing?”
“Cheesecake Factory’s the same old-though I think the old lady at table ten today might have been possessed. She sent her double cheese crunch burger back more times than Sheldon!”
Morgan interrupted before the conversation turned to the horrors of table eleven. “Miss, if you wouldn’t mind letting us in the building? I can find our missing witness and you and Reid here can get caught up.”
Reid looked at him doubtfully. “You sure?”
Morgan looked at him and then at Penny. He tried his best to suggest Reid was an idiot for wanting to work when there was a serious hottie in front of him, but from the careful distance Reid kept from the girl it seems his message didn’t quite get across. Figures Reid would run into a beautiful girl and not really know what to do with her.
“Your haircut looks great!” He overheard Penny gush as he ignored the out of service elevator and started up the stairs-fourth floor according to Mrs. Wolowitz, apartment 4A.
Tinny music filled the hall when he arrived at the fourth floor. He knocked at the door, impatient at all the time he’d wasted searching for Mr. Wolowitz-the kid had better provide a lead or he was going to be one pissed off FBI agent.
“Hello?” a young man questioned as he opened the door, his dark curls mussed and his sleeves pushed up to his elbows. “Can I help you?”
“I’m Special Agent Morgan from the FBI, is Howard Wolowitz in?”
“I told you someone was going to catch on to your pornography habit,” an accented voice hissed from inside the apartment. “I told you! See if I visit you when you’re somebody’s bitch in the big house.”
“Thanks a lot Raj,” a nasal voice complained.
“Dude, you’re the one who waited weeks to tell me you broke up with Bernadette!”
“You’re still on that?”
“Do you know how many more times I could have gone to singles night if I’d had a wingman!”
“At least you got to play handyman with Dr. Plimpton!”
“I’m Leonard Hofstadter, I live here. What do you want with Howard?” he asked, looking pained at the conversation playing out behind him. He tried closing the door slightly, as if hoping that the thin particleboard would block the entire exchange. Morgan stepped forward and Leonard backed up quickly. “Or you could come right in,” he said nervously.
There were three other men inside the apartment, each sitting on the couch with some type of controller in their hands and Chinese takeout on the coffee table. The apartment looked like a nerd’s wet dream-books, whiteboards, and was that a DNA model in the corner? Morgan almost wished Reid hadn’t run into his friend, he was sure Reid would fit right in. Plus it’d be handy to have a geek to human translator.
“I highly doubt the FBI would come in person over Howard’s pornography habits now,” a skinny man was saying from the far corner of the couch. “It seems much more likely they would have intervened early.”
Morgan fought the impulse to slap his head. “Howard Wolowitz?”
A small man in a butt-ugly sweater vest and turtleneck waved his hand nervously from the far corner of the couch. “How can I help you Agent?”
“My name is Special Agent Derek Morgan,” he started then hesitated. “I’m here to ask you about last Wednesday night? We think you might have seen something that could be helpful to our investigation.”
Howard flopped back on the couch with a relieved sigh. “What time Wednesday?”
“The notion that Howard could have seen anything useful is a laughable idea in the first place, unless your idea of useful includes leering at scantily clad women in a futile attempt to achieve coitus,” the thin man on the far end of the couch said haughtily. “Also, Wednesday is Halo night.”
What was with that guy, Morgan thought to himself. The look must have showed on his face.
“He’s not crazy, his mother had him tested,” Leonard informed him as he closed the front door and crossed over to a chair by the sofa. “That’s Sheldon Cooper, my roommate.”
“Doctor Sheldon Cooper, PhD,” the man corrected immediately.
“And this is Raj Koothrappali,” Leonard continued, ignoring his roommates’ sputtering easily. “And we were all here Wednesday night, it was our turn to host. I think we started around 8, like normal.”
“Really Leonard, no wonder your experiments haven’t been going very well if this is the acceptable standard you hold yourself to. Specificity is key,” Sheldon corrected fussily, crossing the room to one of the computers. He typed a few commands, then began to read. “Sheldon’s Log: September 15th, 2010: Wolowitz finally arrives for the weekly Halo game at 8:17, an unacceptable deviation from the mean. This delay will shorten our game play by 8.5 minutes. Wolowitz’s excuses are flimsy at best-a woman, of course. I am considering give him a strike.”
Sheldon turned in his chair. “I haven’t yet decided on the strike,” he informed a stunned Wolowitz. “But given that you were 5 minutes early to Classic Video Game night you may yet escape unscathed.”
“Hey, you’re not allowed to give retroactive strikes!” Wolowitz protested. “That’s totally against the rules.”
Cooper crossed his arms defiantly. “My strike, my rules.”
“Did you see anything on Wednesday evening, around 7:30, or not,” Morgan said when it appeared that the two men were going to continue their argument.
Wolowitz leaned back and ran a hand through his hair absent-mindedly. “7:30? I was getting ready to leave work and head over here. I left my office, went to the parking lot, then came here. Nothing unusual comes to mind.”
“Anthony Lopez disappeared from that parking lot about 15 minutes after you left according to the security cameras. Did you see anything unusual before you left?” Morgan pressed. Lopez was the third disappearance in as many weeks from the area and they’d hit a wall in the investigation almost two days ago.
“I wasn’t really paying attention… I don’t know, the usual? Barry’s shitmobile took up a space and a half as usual, I stopped to flip off Dr. Gablehauser’s car, stopped to admire the hot blonde in the convertible, and left.”
This was new, the cameras hadn’t picked up any convertibles in the lot. “What did she look like?”
Wolowitz grinned lasciviously. “Bleach blonde, brown eyes, kind of looked like Katee Sackhoff in the first season of BSG when she was built. Her hair was down and she was putting on some red lipstick-Va Va Voom by Maybelline-“
“I don’t want to know how you know that,” Leonard muttered from his seat.
Wolowitz continued undeterred, “And her rack was truly stupendous.”
“What about the car? What kind of convertible was it? Did you get a license plate?” Morgan asked.
Wolowitz looked blank. “It was red? Why would I look at the car with such a beautiful specimen of femininity in front of me?”
“Dude, you wouldn’t be able to tell what kind of car it was even if a Nobel depended on it,” Koothrappali crowed.
Cooper barked out something that approximated a laugh as well.
Morgan was now forced to consider the astonishing fact that Reid might not actually be the dorkiest person to walk the planet; in comparison to this room, Reid was actually… cool. He barely managed to suppress a shudder.
Before he was able to get the interview back on track, the front door of the apartment opened.
“Guys, you’ll never guess who I ran in…” Penny said as she burst into the apartment cheerily. Her sentence died when she saw Morgan in the room, “… to? What did you guys do now? Please tell me there wasn’t another North Korean girl?”
Reid stood awkwardly behind her in the doorway. “North Korean?”
“Just ignore her,” Leonard replied quickly. “It’s good to see you again Spencer. This is Special Agent Morgan-do you know him?”
“We actually work together,” Reid replied. “I ran into Penny in the lobby and Morgan came to interview a Mr. Wolowitz?”
Wolowitz raised a hand from his spot on the couch.
“Why didn’t you tell me you knew him?” Morgan hissed quietly. Though apparently not quietly enough from the knowing look Penny shot him.
“I only met Sheldon, Leonard, and Penny,” Reid explained easily, hiding a slight grin as if he’d an inking of the pain Morgan was in and was enjoying it. “They had talked about some friends of theirs, Howard and Raj, but how was I supposed to know Howard Wolowitz was the same Howard? Besides, weren’t you the one to suggest I stay to catch up with Penny?”
Sheldon made a coughing noise that sounded suspiciously like thirty-three, but stopped when he noticed Penny glaring at him and making threatening movements towards his computer.
“All right,” Morgan shouted, getting the attention of the room easily. He noticed that Wolowitz even flinched a bit. “You’ve been very helpful Mr. Wolowitz, please give us a call if you remember anything else about the car or the woman. Reid, let’s go.”
He swore Reid almost pouted, but finally turned to the room with a sad half-wave and said, “It was nice to see you all again. If we have any time after the case is over, I’ll give you a call.”
Sheldon sniffed disdainfully. “If you must.”
Penny smiled brightly. “It was great to see you again sweetie. And remember…”
“If I see Lila Archer again, I will mention over and over again how good an actress you are,” Reid recited. “Got it.”
“How would Reid know if you’re a good actress Penny?” Leonard asked curiously.
Morgan didn’t bother to suppress a groan-he was never leaving.
“Because I act like I don’t want to kill Sheldon here every day,” she replied through clenched teeth.
“Good point.”
“Reid,” Morgan said behind clenched teeth, “it’s time to go. Now.”
He all but tackled the other man in his haste to get him down the stairs and back to the car. Pasadena was one weird city-give him murderous freaks any day of the week.
Author: jujuberry136
Rating: PG-13
Pairing: Gen
Fandoms: Criminal Minds/The Big Bang Theory
Word Count: 2,075
Summary: “I’m Special Agent Morgan from the FBI, is Howard Wolowitz in?”
“I told you someone was going to catch on to your pornography habit,” an accented voice hissed from inside the apartment. “I told you! See if I visit you when you’re somebody’s bitch in the big house.”
Author’s Notes: Follows from Reunion, but not necessary to read to understand this (though it’d probably help). Thanks to ambrosia4all for the beta (and for pushing for more tackling) and for all the lovely reviews of “Reunion,” which inspired this sequel.
~*~*~*~*~*~
Morgan growled as he got back into the SUV.
“The witness was that bad?” Reid asked curiously, chewing on a Rice Krispies treat bar while studying the file in his lap intently.
“Didn’t get a chance to talk to him,” Morgan replied, pulling back into traffic. “His mother said since it’s Friday he’s at a friend’s house, something about Chinese food and old video games.”
“So where we going?”
“Apartment complex near the university, and no offense man, but I need a little silence.”
Reid raised an eyebrow curiously.
“The mother was a little… loud,” Morgan explained. “Pretty much shouted at me from the kitchen the entire time I was there. Her voice… let’s just say I feel for the guy.”
Reid nodded and thankfully let the silence continue until they got to the apartment complex ten minutes later. “Hey, I know this place.”
“Really?”
Reid nodded. “Yeah, a friend of mine lives here. I hung out with him and his friends for an evening the last time we were in L.A.”
“Really? You guys hit up any good clubs? Get caught making out with another actress by the paparazzi?” Morgan grinned as Reid swung at him irritably.
Reid pushed the call buttons for all of the apartments viciously. “Not really my scene-or theirs. We hung out and watched some Doctor Who dvds, then JJ picked me up in the morning in time for our flight.”
“Exciting,” Morgan replied flatly.
“Sorry, the buzzers haven’t worked in ages,” a voice said perkily from behind him. He turned around to find a smiling gorgeous blonde. From her frank appraisal, she liked what she saw as much as he did.
He noticed the keys in her hand. “Thanks for the info,” he replied, smiling broadly and taking off his sunglasses. ”Any chance you could let us in? We’re with the FBI.”
“Wow,” the girl replied, “that’s so cool. What are you doing here, Agent…?”
“Special Agent Derek Morgan,” he filled in. “And this is Special Agent-“
“Reid?” the girl gasped, then ran forward and gave him a big hug. What was it with that boy and blondes?
“Penny!” Reid replied after getting his breath back. “It’s so good to see you again, how are you doing?”
“Cheesecake Factory’s the same old-though I think the old lady at table ten today might have been possessed. She sent her double cheese crunch burger back more times than Sheldon!”
Morgan interrupted before the conversation turned to the horrors of table eleven. “Miss, if you wouldn’t mind letting us in the building? I can find our missing witness and you and Reid here can get caught up.”
Reid looked at him doubtfully. “You sure?”
Morgan looked at him and then at Penny. He tried his best to suggest Reid was an idiot for wanting to work when there was a serious hottie in front of him, but from the careful distance Reid kept from the girl it seems his message didn’t quite get across. Figures Reid would run into a beautiful girl and not really know what to do with her.
“Your haircut looks great!” He overheard Penny gush as he ignored the out of service elevator and started up the stairs-fourth floor according to Mrs. Wolowitz, apartment 4A.
Tinny music filled the hall when he arrived at the fourth floor. He knocked at the door, impatient at all the time he’d wasted searching for Mr. Wolowitz-the kid had better provide a lead or he was going to be one pissed off FBI agent.
“Hello?” a young man questioned as he opened the door, his dark curls mussed and his sleeves pushed up to his elbows. “Can I help you?”
“I’m Special Agent Morgan from the FBI, is Howard Wolowitz in?”
“I told you someone was going to catch on to your pornography habit,” an accented voice hissed from inside the apartment. “I told you! See if I visit you when you’re somebody’s bitch in the big house.”
“Thanks a lot Raj,” a nasal voice complained.
“Dude, you’re the one who waited weeks to tell me you broke up with Bernadette!”
“You’re still on that?”
“Do you know how many more times I could have gone to singles night if I’d had a wingman!”
“At least you got to play handyman with Dr. Plimpton!”
“I’m Leonard Hofstadter, I live here. What do you want with Howard?” he asked, looking pained at the conversation playing out behind him. He tried closing the door slightly, as if hoping that the thin particleboard would block the entire exchange. Morgan stepped forward and Leonard backed up quickly. “Or you could come right in,” he said nervously.
There were three other men inside the apartment, each sitting on the couch with some type of controller in their hands and Chinese takeout on the coffee table. The apartment looked like a nerd’s wet dream-books, whiteboards, and was that a DNA model in the corner? Morgan almost wished Reid hadn’t run into his friend, he was sure Reid would fit right in. Plus it’d be handy to have a geek to human translator.
“I highly doubt the FBI would come in person over Howard’s pornography habits now,” a skinny man was saying from the far corner of the couch. “It seems much more likely they would have intervened early.”
Morgan fought the impulse to slap his head. “Howard Wolowitz?”
A small man in a butt-ugly sweater vest and turtleneck waved his hand nervously from the far corner of the couch. “How can I help you Agent?”
“My name is Special Agent Derek Morgan,” he started then hesitated. “I’m here to ask you about last Wednesday night? We think you might have seen something that could be helpful to our investigation.”
Howard flopped back on the couch with a relieved sigh. “What time Wednesday?”
“The notion that Howard could have seen anything useful is a laughable idea in the first place, unless your idea of useful includes leering at scantily clad women in a futile attempt to achieve coitus,” the thin man on the far end of the couch said haughtily. “Also, Wednesday is Halo night.”
What was with that guy, Morgan thought to himself. The look must have showed on his face.
“He’s not crazy, his mother had him tested,” Leonard informed him as he closed the front door and crossed over to a chair by the sofa. “That’s Sheldon Cooper, my roommate.”
“Doctor Sheldon Cooper, PhD,” the man corrected immediately.
“And this is Raj Koothrappali,” Leonard continued, ignoring his roommates’ sputtering easily. “And we were all here Wednesday night, it was our turn to host. I think we started around 8, like normal.”
“Really Leonard, no wonder your experiments haven’t been going very well if this is the acceptable standard you hold yourself to. Specificity is key,” Sheldon corrected fussily, crossing the room to one of the computers. He typed a few commands, then began to read. “Sheldon’s Log: September 15th, 2010: Wolowitz finally arrives for the weekly Halo game at 8:17, an unacceptable deviation from the mean. This delay will shorten our game play by 8.5 minutes. Wolowitz’s excuses are flimsy at best-a woman, of course. I am considering give him a strike.”
Sheldon turned in his chair. “I haven’t yet decided on the strike,” he informed a stunned Wolowitz. “But given that you were 5 minutes early to Classic Video Game night you may yet escape unscathed.”
“Hey, you’re not allowed to give retroactive strikes!” Wolowitz protested. “That’s totally against the rules.”
Cooper crossed his arms defiantly. “My strike, my rules.”
“Did you see anything on Wednesday evening, around 7:30, or not,” Morgan said when it appeared that the two men were going to continue their argument.
Wolowitz leaned back and ran a hand through his hair absent-mindedly. “7:30? I was getting ready to leave work and head over here. I left my office, went to the parking lot, then came here. Nothing unusual comes to mind.”
“Anthony Lopez disappeared from that parking lot about 15 minutes after you left according to the security cameras. Did you see anything unusual before you left?” Morgan pressed. Lopez was the third disappearance in as many weeks from the area and they’d hit a wall in the investigation almost two days ago.
“I wasn’t really paying attention… I don’t know, the usual? Barry’s shitmobile took up a space and a half as usual, I stopped to flip off Dr. Gablehauser’s car, stopped to admire the hot blonde in the convertible, and left.”
This was new, the cameras hadn’t picked up any convertibles in the lot. “What did she look like?”
Wolowitz grinned lasciviously. “Bleach blonde, brown eyes, kind of looked like Katee Sackhoff in the first season of BSG when she was built. Her hair was down and she was putting on some red lipstick-Va Va Voom by Maybelline-“
“I don’t want to know how you know that,” Leonard muttered from his seat.
Wolowitz continued undeterred, “And her rack was truly stupendous.”
“What about the car? What kind of convertible was it? Did you get a license plate?” Morgan asked.
Wolowitz looked blank. “It was red? Why would I look at the car with such a beautiful specimen of femininity in front of me?”
“Dude, you wouldn’t be able to tell what kind of car it was even if a Nobel depended on it,” Koothrappali crowed.
Cooper barked out something that approximated a laugh as well.
Morgan was now forced to consider the astonishing fact that Reid might not actually be the dorkiest person to walk the planet; in comparison to this room, Reid was actually… cool. He barely managed to suppress a shudder.
Before he was able to get the interview back on track, the front door of the apartment opened.
“Guys, you’ll never guess who I ran in…” Penny said as she burst into the apartment cheerily. Her sentence died when she saw Morgan in the room, “… to? What did you guys do now? Please tell me there wasn’t another North Korean girl?”
Reid stood awkwardly behind her in the doorway. “North Korean?”
“Just ignore her,” Leonard replied quickly. “It’s good to see you again Spencer. This is Special Agent Morgan-do you know him?”
“We actually work together,” Reid replied. “I ran into Penny in the lobby and Morgan came to interview a Mr. Wolowitz?”
Wolowitz raised a hand from his spot on the couch.
“Why didn’t you tell me you knew him?” Morgan hissed quietly. Though apparently not quietly enough from the knowing look Penny shot him.
“I only met Sheldon, Leonard, and Penny,” Reid explained easily, hiding a slight grin as if he’d an inking of the pain Morgan was in and was enjoying it. “They had talked about some friends of theirs, Howard and Raj, but how was I supposed to know Howard Wolowitz was the same Howard? Besides, weren’t you the one to suggest I stay to catch up with Penny?”
Sheldon made a coughing noise that sounded suspiciously like thirty-three, but stopped when he noticed Penny glaring at him and making threatening movements towards his computer.
“All right,” Morgan shouted, getting the attention of the room easily. He noticed that Wolowitz even flinched a bit. “You’ve been very helpful Mr. Wolowitz, please give us a call if you remember anything else about the car or the woman. Reid, let’s go.”
He swore Reid almost pouted, but finally turned to the room with a sad half-wave and said, “It was nice to see you all again. If we have any time after the case is over, I’ll give you a call.”
Sheldon sniffed disdainfully. “If you must.”
Penny smiled brightly. “It was great to see you again sweetie. And remember…”
“If I see Lila Archer again, I will mention over and over again how good an actress you are,” Reid recited. “Got it.”
“How would Reid know if you’re a good actress Penny?” Leonard asked curiously.
Morgan didn’t bother to suppress a groan-he was never leaving.
“Because I act like I don’t want to kill Sheldon here every day,” she replied through clenched teeth.
“Good point.”
“Reid,” Morgan said behind clenched teeth, “it’s time to go. Now.”
He all but tackled the other man in his haste to get him down the stairs and back to the car. Pasadena was one weird city-give him murderous freaks any day of the week.