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In the fall of 2001, now bereft of both a job and his children, Muhammad's behavior had become increasingly bizarre. In October Muhammad and Malvo began frequenting Stuart's Coffee House. Muhammad took an intense interest in a redheaded street guitarist named Hannah Parks, 20, and her son Jazz, 4. For three weeks he badgered Parks for her phone number and address, telling her he was a record producer and inviting her to come to New York with him. "He knew a lot about music. He offered to buy me a drink and showed me a fat wallet of money," Parks recalls. "I had a bad feeling about him. He took an interest in my son, and that freaked me out the most." He asked Jazz, who is half black, about his ethnicity. Parks told him not to question the boy again, and the relationship chilled. Says Parks: "He would sit there and watch me. He stopped saying hi, and he got grim. I'd wave, but he gave me the willies. I'd look over, and he'd stare at me."
In February Muhammad was arrested for shoplifting veggie burgers, steaks and tea worth a total of $27.37 from a Tacoma grocer. Two months later, he visited an old Army buddy, Robert Edward Holmes, who claims that Muhammad showed him two rifles and a book on silencers, according to the arrest warrant that the feds would later use to nab Muhammad. "Can you imagine the damage you would do if you could shoot with a silencer?" Muhammad allegedly asked Holmes.
Last summer Muhammad and Malvo left Washington for good and headed east. In July they showed up in Baton Rouge, surprising his ex-wife Carol. Later that summer he apparently tracked down Mildred despite a restraining order. Vincent Davis, 26, who lives in a town house adjacent to Mildred's, says he recalls seeing Muhammad talking to her in front of her home three or four months ago. One night more recently, during the weeks of the shootings, another neighbor, Steven Perry, 31, saw the blue Caprice parked outside Mildred's house with a figure reclining in the front seat. It appeared that Muhammad was making the rounds of all his lost homes. But it was the suburbs of Maryland, tantalizingly close to the children he had most recently lost, that Muhammad allegedly chose as his killing fields.
On Sept. 10, Muhammad bought the Caprice at a Trenton, N.J., auto dealer. "He was impatient. He talked back rude," says Fernando Maestre, 20, the salesman who dealt with Muhammad. Even though he didn't ask Muhammad why he was buying a car, Muhammad volunteered three different explanations, Maestre says. First he said he wanted it for his son; then he said it was for himself; and finally he said he wanted to use it as a taxi. "He didn't want us to find out a lot about him."