“The injured. How bad were they?”
“They were bad off. Covered in blood, all three of them.”
“What did they look like?”
“Like regular cops, I guess.”
Andy cocked his head. “Cops?”
“Yeah. A couple of Metro police cars pulled up, and one group of cops loaded up another from the elevator.”
At this moment, the Washington Post reporter knew this bartender was lying. No cops had been injured. All three of the Transit Police had been killed down below in the station, and Andy had been on scene before the bodies had been collected. On top of that, they had been loaded in ambulances, not squad cars.
Andy thanked the guy perfunctorily, although he wanted to punch him in the face for wasting his time, and he moved on, looking for someone who wasn’t full of shit.
By eleven a.m. he felt ready to call it off. All the Red Bull and coffee in the District couldn’t keep his mood up after so many fruitless conversations, and just the same as in Chevy Chase, the only people who had been around at the time of the event that Andy found had said they’d been standing around the police cordon filming after the shooting. He’d even watched a few examples of footage, and each time it was useless to him. Even if the recordings had been made early on, while events were still unfolding belowground, the only thing captured had been screaming and stampeding civilians and a few beat cops yelling for everyone to get the hell back.
A middle-aged Chinese sandwich maker at a chain sub shop at first didn’t seem interested in talking to Andy, but after he ordered a foot-long pastrami, she was stuck chatting with him while she prepared it.
Andy said, “A lot of people out on the street are still talking about it.”
“Yeah,” she said as she squirted mustard and mayo on his bread. “It was crazy. Everybody running every way. Somebody said there was bomb.”
Andy shook his head. “No bomb. A man with a gun.”
“Yeah. I saw some people bleeding.” She added, “I was just getting off work, walking to the Metro, when everybody started running out. I took some video, but I didn’t see nothing important.”
As she rang up his sandwich, he felt obliged to ask her what, specifically, she had recorded. “You don’t have to show me—in fact, I have to take my lunch to go—but can you just briefly describe what you saw?”
She waved her hand away dismissively. “Nothing, really. Just the police taking the wounded cops off the elevator. Putting them in the car and driving off. That’s all.”
Andy cocked his head. He didn’t think for a second that was what the woman had actually recorded, but there must have been some real confusion to the scene, considering the fact her story matched closely with what one of the other witnesses had said. “On second thought, can I take a look?”
It took the lady a minute to get her plastic gloves off and retrieve her phone from her purse in the back, and another minute to pull up the clip. She played it while holding it for Andy at first, but about thirty seconds into the video, he ripped it from her hands.
Then he said, “What the hell is this?”
It wasn’t high quality by any stretch, but the video showed enough for Andy to realize he was seeing something that no one in the local police had admitted. These were clearly wounded D.C. Metro officers, three of them being helped out of the elevator and placed into a pair of cruisers. All three men bled from their faces, and two of them were all but dragged by their colleagues. Just as they finished loading them, the elevator door opened again, and another cop staggered out and fell into the arms of his colleagues. This man looked as if he was bleeding profusely from multiple gunshot wounds. He was placed inside one of the cruisers himself, and the cars rolled off, east on Q Street NW.
Right before the video ended, the squad cars rolled right by the woman holding the cellphone that made the recording.
When it was over, Andy looked up from the phone at the Chinese sandwich artist.
“Did you show this to the police?”
She shook her head and looked down. Andy had met enough foreigners in the District to read the signals. She didn’t have papers to work legally here, so she kept her contact with authorities to a minimum.
He stopped the video and pushed it back a few seconds, then let it play again. The woman offered to sell him the entire phone for $500, but he declined, gave her a hundred bucks for her time, and e-mailed the video directly from her phone to his Washington Post e-mail account.
A minute later he was seated at a table in the restaurant, and the Chinese lady was looking at him like she thought he might try to steal her cell phone. Instead he pulled out his own phone and called a buddy in the D.C. Metro Motor Pool, an old cop who used to work out in District Seven but was rewarded with a cushy desk job for the last few years before retirement.