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?”