Pay attention, profilers have long warned, to a serial killer's first strike. The first of the bullets that strafed the suburbs of Washington last week sliced through the air over a drab strip-mall parking lot in Aspen Hill, Md., and cracked a nickel-size hole in the front window of a Michaels craft store. It then arced through a leafy display of silk autumnal bouquets, zipped behind the head of a female cashier and pierced a hole through thelamp over the register of lane No. 5. Emerging on the other side, it whizzed over a Christmas-ornament display and finally ricocheted off a shelf of Inspiration for the Heart mini prayer books. Unlike every shot to come, the bullet hurt no one.
The bullet fragments, lying there on the store floor, not far from a selection of bride-and-groom wedding-cake figurines, communicated the theme of this diabolical case: no matter how upscale the neighborhood, no matter how comfortable the surroundings, you too could be a target. Here, among the endless supermarkets, party stores and gas stations, a malicious hunter--or hunters--has taken position in the natural habitat of contemporary Americans. And incredibly, each time, despite busy, well-lighted streets, no one noticed the shooter. As it turns out, the suburbs, with a camouflage of hedgerows, neon signs and anonymous traffic, make a better shooting gallery than a dark alley.
But if the randomness of the crime is rare, the counterattack has been groundbreaking. Because the crime scenes ring the nation's capital--and because this area was so recently scarred by terrorist attacks--little has been spared in the search for the killer. Says Montgomery County Executive Douglas Duncan: "Everyone rushed forward to help us that first day. I don't think that would have happened before 9/11." An estimated 1,000 people are working on the case, including Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF) units, U.S. Marshals and state police. One kindergarten-through-second-grade school in Montgomery County was watched over alternately last week by police, Secret Service agents and the FBI. The feds have donated premier ballistics forensics investigators. The FBI, using software originally designed for movies such as Star Wars, is creating animated 3-D computer-graphic displays to reconstruct the crime scene and help calculate the sniper's position, in hopes of jogging potential witnesses' memories. And federal law-enforcement sources tell TIME that the bureau has asked the Pentagon to search its records for recently discharged GIs who went through sniper school. The schools teach snipers to work in tandem--one as the spotter, the other as the shooter.
For the police, the p.r. challenge alone has been dizzying. Investigators had to carefully weigh their obligation to keep the public informed and calmed while knowing that they were also talking to the killer. At each ofthe 50 or so press briefings since the firstshooting, officials have agonized over what effect public statements may have on the shooter. Hopefully, Montgomery County police chief Charles Moose told TIME, "Nobody ever has to live with the fact that maybe something they did kept this person or these people out there any longer than they have been." In 16 hours, Moose encountered almost three times as many homicide reports as his department usually sees in a month.