“Okay,” Andy said. “But if you need anything at all, you don’t have to bother your regular team. I’m sure they’ve got a lot to do. Give me a call and I’ll jump on it.”

“I know you will,” she said.

—

Andy Shoal hung up the phone and went right back to work. He told himself he was working harder than anyone else on Catherine King’s much higher-paid and much higher-regarded investigative team, and this was probably true. He’d already spent ten hours in Chevy Chase and Bethesda looking for any witnesses to the events that transpired there the previous Monday night.

Undaunted after a long night with nothing to show for it, this morning he arrived in Dupont Circle. He’d spent the last two hours—minus a twenty-minute break to step into the nearby Krispy Kreme for a breakfast of coffee and donuts—interviewing anyone who would talk to him about the event in the metro station here on Wednesday. He was looking for someone who could say they saw Max Ohlhauser before he was killed, or identify anyone else at the scene who had been part of the melee. If this mysterious Six’s story was to pan out, if it was true he did not shoot Ohlhauser or the cops, then someone in this area just might have seen other people running around with guns.

He’d met several individuals throughout the morning who had been here during the shooting. Most lived in neighboring buildings or else they were employees of the bars, restaurants, and little shops around Dupont Circle. A few people confided in him they’d seen nothing, and others greatly exaggerated their access to the events in question.

One, a bartender at a Mexican restaurant who was getting ready for the brunch crowd, had, at first, seemed like he had a real contribution to make. He claimed to have seen wounded people being hauled out of the handicap elevator, just across the street from the window in front of his bar. Andy pulled out his notebook and started asking him follow-up questions.

“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.