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00:00:55.800It is Wednesday night, 6 p.m., October 2nd, 2002, in the parking lot of a shopper's food warehouse on Randolph Road in Wheaton, Maryland, a comfortable inner suburb just north of Washington, D.C.
00:01:09.880It looks like every other grocery store lot in America at the end of a workday.
00:01:14.140Scattered cars and shopping carts, people loading kids and groceries, the autumn sky going dark over the storefronts.
00:01:21.880A gray pickup truck with an American flag on its antenna pulls into the lot and parks.
00:01:28.380A man in a business suit and tie climbs out after a long day, a grocery list in his pocket.
00:06:05.500Forty minutes earlier, in another shopping center a few miles up the road, a bullet shattered the front window of a Michaels Craft store, striking an illuminated No. 5 hanging over one of the checkout lanes, almost seven feet in the air.
00:06:22.720At the time, it looked like vandalism, maybe a stray round from a gang gunfire, or just random.
00:06:29.300Now, at the Shoppers' Food Warehouse on Randolph Road, Montgomery County's brand-new police spokeswoman, Captain Nancy Dem, reaches her boss, Police Chief Charles Moose, on her phone.
00:06:42.160She has been on the job a matter of hours.
00:06:45.280I don't know what we have here, Dem tells him, but it is different from your regular homicide.
00:06:50.800The man on the ground seems nice and normal, ordinary, government ID.
00:12:59.26031 minutes after Buchanan is shot, about six miles away, a taxi driver named Premkumar
00:13:07.060Wallacher pulls into a mobile gas station to fill his tank. He needs gas. He also wants some gum
00:13:13.500and lottery tickets. The station in Aspen Hill, Maryland is a half block from the Michaels Craft
00:13:20.280Store where the front window got shot out the previous day. He is 54 from Pune, India, and he
00:13:27.140drives for a company called Presidential Cab. He usually starts his shift around noon. This
00:13:33.020morning he clocked in early so he could get off early and get home to his wife and kids for the
00:13:37.440afternoon. He attends a Seventh-day Adventist church and has been married to his wife for 25
00:13:44.060years. The sign on the roof of his cab reads, of all things, call 911. That is his cab company's
00:13:52.980number. You dial 911 taxi to order a ride. He is standing at the gas pump when the shot comes.
00:14:00.500At the next pump island, a doctor named Caroline Namro, who has just dropped her older children
00:14:06.220at school and still has her two-year-old buckled in the back of her van, hears the bang. She looks
00:14:12.740up to see Wallacher walking toward her with a startled look on his face. Call an ambulance,
00:14:17.640he says. Then he collapses beside her van, leaving a long smear of his blood down the
00:14:23.780side of her passenger door. Namro grabs her phone and calls 911.
00:14:39.900Namro gets down on the concrete and does what she can, starting chest compressions,
00:14:44.520then mouth to mouth. Wallacher is bleeding heavily from his side, the blood pooling on the ground.
00:14:50.800It started over there, went over there, and the guy's laying on the ground, blood all over the
00:14:54.340side of the van. He's laying on the ground, gasping for air, and the lady, she's standing
00:14:59.200there shaking. She was trying to help him. In the middle of her rescue efforts, the victim vomits,
00:15:04.380his airway closes, and Dr. Namro cannot clear it. Kremkumar Wallacher dies at the pump.
00:15:11.840At 8.37, 25 minutes later, a 34-year-old woman named Sarah Ramos is sitting on a bench outside a post office beside the Leisure World Retirement Community.
00:15:24.280She was a law student once back in El Salvador. Now she cleans houses to keep the family afloat.0.82
00:15:31.000She came to America with her husband, a college teacher there, and their little boy, and it did not go the way they hoped.
00:15:38.880Her husband could not find work teaching and grew depressed.
00:15:42.700This morning she took the bus and is waiting on the bench for the woman whose house she is going to clean.
00:15:48.780She is reading, her head down, her purse beside her.
00:15:52.720She never sees the car at the far edge of the lot.
00:15:55.580A single rifle bullet enters the top of her skull and exits the back of her neck
00:16:00.840and carries on through the restaurant window behind her.
00:16:04.120Her book is still open in her lap when it fills with blood.
00:16:09.020At 9.58 a.m., an hour and 21 minutes later, a 25-year-old woman named Lori Ann Lewis Rivera,
00:16:17.460a nanny who moved to Maryland from Idaho, is at a Shell station in Kensington cleaning out her employer's minivan.
00:16:25.320She is a large, gentle young woman whose blonde hair is so pale it looks nearly white.
00:16:32.000She has just switched on the vacuum to suck up Cheerios off the floorboard
00:19:39.460Four people in two hours and 17 minutes.
00:19:42.460a landscaper on a mower, a cab driver getting gas, a woman sitting on a bench reading,
00:19:50.540and a nanny vacuuming a van. Count James Martin from Shopper's Parking Lot the night before,
00:19:57.120and it is five dead in 16 hours. They do not line up. Two white men, a white woman,
00:20:04.480an Indian man, a Salvadoran woman. Different ages, different jobs, different corners of the
00:20:10.920same suburban county. The only thing the five of them have in common is that each was, for one
00:20:16.820second, exposed, standing still out in the open. And no one ever sees who does it. There's no
00:20:25.920muzzle flash anyone can point to, no figure running, no window rolled down. Each shot comes
00:20:32.700from somewhere out past the edge of the lot, a tree line, a passing car, and by the time anyone
00:20:38.300looks, there is nothing there at all. The detective who was assigned to the James Martin
00:20:43.760killing, the first murder in this spree, Patrick McNerney, is home when his sister, a local TV
00:20:50.740news editor, calls to say there has been a shooting at a gas station up the road. Anything
00:20:56.180odd about it? He asks her. People heard a loud bang, she says. He is already heading out the door.
00:21:03.220At Suburban Hospital, a major crimes corporal named Gene Curtis has the second victim,
00:21:09.100Sonny Buchanan's, body unzipped from its bag, and he does not need a medical examiner to tell him
00:21:14.700what he's looking at. This kind of wound, he tells the doctors, goes in small and comes out big.
00:21:20.940How many of these are we going to have, he thinks. Maybe the next one will be a cop.
00:21:26.320By now, the police are chasing the cases faster than they can work them.
00:21:29.880The detectives still writing up James Martin's death at the Wheaton Shoppers parking lot from last night get the calls from Rockville, then Aspen Hill, then Kensington, a fresh body every half hour, all inside a few square miles.
00:21:45.100At the hospitals, the same trauma teams that took Buchanan and Wallacher in the morning are bracing for the next body, and it is not over.
00:21:53.440Around 9 o'clock p.m., two people are loading a car outside a restaurant called the Tropicana
00:22:01.000on Georgia Avenue just inside Washington, D.C., a few blocks below the Maryland line.
00:22:07.340The woman is named Gail Howard, and she owns the place. She is walking the night's receipts out to
00:22:12.800her car. The man is Carl Largi, one of her employees, and he is out in the lot with a
00:22:18.900cigarette, keeping an eye on things. It's very dark. The nearest streetlight is flickering on
00:22:24.040and off. The morning's killings have been on every television in the region all day. Gail Howard is
00:22:30.700wary of crossing the open lot. Parked on the side street near them is an old dark car with tinted
00:22:37.240windows. Its back end turned toward Georgia Avenue. They notice it and think nothing of it.
00:22:43.700Then there is a loud boom. It could be a blown tire or a car backfiring. Out on Georgia Avenue,
00:22:52.000a city bus screeches to a stop. Carl tells Gail it was either the bus or a gunshot, loud but
00:22:59.240strangely muffled. A few seconds later, the old dark car slides away down Kalmia Street with its
00:23:06.300lights off. Look at the idiot with his lights off, Carl says. They finish loading up and Gail gets1.00
00:23:12.740in her own car and drives home. Carl stays behind. Within minutes, the corner is lit up with police
00:23:19.860lights and an ambulance and word travels that a man is dead. Five minutes later, Gail's phone
00:23:25.960rings. It's Carl. Guess what, he says. It was a gunshot. That night's killing crosses the district
00:23:33.060line. A block away on the southeast corner of Georgia Avenue and Kalmia Road, a 72-year-old man
00:23:40.040is lying on the pavement. His name is Pascal Charleau. He left Haiti for America many years
00:23:47.420ago. He is a carpenter, a man who can build anything. He and his disabled wife share a
00:23:53.860row home with lawn chairs and potted plants on the front porch. And out back, he keeps a garden
00:23:59.380of tomatoes and bell peppers. He loves to walk, but tonight he has taken the bus home. He gets
00:24:05.280off and is standing under a streetlight waiting to cross to his house. Pascal is gazing up at
00:24:11.760the stars, and he raises his right hand toward his chin when the bullet comes. It goes through
00:24:18.160his palm and blows a two-inch hole in his hand before it punches into his chest below the left
00:24:24.360collarbone. It shatters his collarbone and ribs, tearing open veins and arteries. Pascal Charleau
00:24:32.320goes down on the corner. 72 years of life and it ends like this. He is the sixth person killed
00:24:40.440in a little over 24 hours. The man handling all of this is the chief of the Montgomery County
00:24:47.060Maryland Police, a career officer named Charles Moose. He is 49. He originally wanted to become
00:24:54.660a lawyer, got sidetracked and decided to give the police department a try. Before he knew it,
00:25:00.300he started climbing the ranks, getting decorations and a doctorate along the way. He is a big
00:25:05.940proponent of active listening, but he also battles a white-hot temper, and there are stories about it.
00:25:12.620He's gone to anger management counseling. By the end of that first day, Moose is looking at six
00:25:18.280people shot dead across Montgomery County and the district. No motive, no suspect, no witness who
00:25:25.900can describe a shooter. Not even a bullet or a shell casing his investigators can recover in
00:25:31.160one piece. Assistant Chief of Police Deirdre Walker would later tell the Discovery Channel
00:25:36.160that it seemed to be an impossible task. We had no physical description. We had no good
00:25:44.100eyewitnesses. How do you draw up a plan to find a ghost? Moose drives himself down to the mobile
00:25:51.200station crime scene where Premkumar Wallachar died. But instead of pulling in, he tucks his
00:25:57.580car into a mall lot across the street, gets out, and stands there watching. He wants to see the
00:26:03.880situation from a distance. Standing there in the sun, a thought settles on Moose that he cannot
00:26:10.280shake, that the man who did this could be out here right now, close by, watching him back.
00:26:17.620By then, investigators are convinced the shootings are connected.
00:26:23.460That is the worst possible news for a public already terrorized by anthrax and 9-11.