The victims were carrying out the banal tasks of everyday life, their last unremarkable moments juxtaposed with the killer's lightning brutality. Officials speculated that this could be a terrorist attack, but everyone searched in vain for any overt political message. The victims, if they were lined up side by side, would roughly resemble a random sampling of the D.C. metropolitan area. They were white, black, hispanic, Indian, male and female. There was a government analyst, a landscaper, a cleaning lady, a nanny. The first shooting that broke the killing pattern, flimsy at it was, came the next day in a parking lot in Spotsylvania County, Va. The shooter had deviated by about 70 miles from the epicenter of the other attacks, spurring speculation that he was rebelling against talking-head hypotheses that he must live in Montgomery County. The shooting also left the woman injured but alive. And it took place in front of another Michaels store. Desperate for a motive, police contacted Michaels headquarters in Texas for reports of disgruntled employees. But the return to a Michaels craft store may have been sheer coincidence, since there are 40 of them in Maryland and Virginia.

FBI profilers began working on the case, and, at the ATF's suggestion, geographic profiler Kim Rossmo stepped in. "Random crimes aren't random, not in the mathematical sense," says Rossmo, a former Vancouver police official. After studying about 4,000 criminals, Rossmo is convinced that most criminals operate a predictable distance from where they live and work. They are constantly juggling the competing urges to attack in a convenient and familiar locale and to go unrecognized. That means they tend to pick hunting grounds midway between the places they know best. When a criminals' stats are plugged into an algorithm Rossmo has developed using his theory, it creates a rainbow-hued map, with the crime scenes in lime and yellow zones, the perpetrator's likely home in bright red or orange, and the least productive places to look in indigo. It's a tidy treasure map, but Rossmo concedes his program won't find a killer by itself. "There are only three ways you can solve a crime: physical evidence, eye witnesses, or a confession."

After 48 hours without a shooting, Moose appeared on Sunday afternoon, Oct. 6, at a press briefing to reassure the public. He promised to "greatly increase" police presence at area schools the following day, though he couldn't guarantee officers at every building. The next morning, an eighth-grade boy was shot in front of Benjamin Tasker Middle School in Bowie, Md. At a press conference, Moose struggled for composure. "I guess it's getting to be really, really personal now," he said.

The boy, whose name has not been released, had just been dropped off by his aunt, less than 20 feet from the school door. Driving away, she heard a loud sound and turned around to see her nephew on the ground. His science teacher, Karen Pumphrey, walked out to find the boy lying on the ground, grimacing in pain. "I've been shot," he told her. "Are you kidding?" Pumphrey asked, accustomed to her student's practical jokes. Suffering from injuries to the spleen, stomach, pancreas, lung and diaphragm, his condition is critical but stable.

Frantic parents streamed back from work to pick up their children from area schools. As protective police helicopters hovered, residents shut themselves inside. Says Sherri Long, whose daughter Staci is a student at Tasker: "People who needed to get prescriptions waited. We've got tapes due back at Blockbuster and we'll just pay the fines."

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