The first bullet smashed through the store's front window, over by the pay phone, and skimmed a light fixture inside.

No one was hurt in the Michaels crafts store in Aspen Hill. The police were called. Customers continued shopping. There was no panic.

No one knew what was coming.

It was Oct. 2 at 5:20 p.m., not yet dusk in Montgomery County.

Within the hour, the brazen sniper would claim his first victim. He would go on to shoot 13 people - killing 10 - as they pumped gas, loaded groceries, went out to dinner. He wouldn't miss again.

Speeding on and off the interstates, maybe in a white van and maybe not, maybe in a box truck and maybe not, he would terrorize a region suddenly afraid to buy cold medicine and fish food and regular unleaded. He would pick off his prey in busy shopping centers, just off highway interchanges - in the most public, and seemingly safest, of places.

So began an extraordinary three weeks, 22 days that altered life in the Washington region in ways never thought possible. People's lives were lost, leaving deep holes in the lives of those who loved them. Many more were altered in subtler ways: schoolchildren cooped up inside for fear of attack on the playgrounds, and worried there might be no Halloween; people crouching beside their cars as they pumped gasoline, getting trapped in traffic jams as police set up dragnets to catch a killer; politicians worried that Election Day would suffer a record low turnout, with voters unwilling to risk their lives to go to the polls.

"Everyone kind of mustered up some coping skills we didn't know were there," said Quintin Satterfield, a home inspector and father of eight from Wheaton who frequents many of the establishments that would become sniper targets. "This was a novel experience for everyone."

A few minutes after 6 p.m. that first night, a mile from the crafts store, James D. Martin was at the Shoppers Food Warehouse in Wheaton. He stopped to buy groceries for his church program. The crowded parking lot, across the street from the Glenmont police station, was teeming with rush-hour shoppers popping in for a few items on the way home from work.

A single gunshot rang out. Martin became the 21st person killed in Montgomery County this year.

The death of the 55-year-old federal worker, who lived in Silver Spring with his wife and 11-year-old son, received only three paragraphs in the next morning's paper.

The national media would be on the story before lunch.

Deadly rampage

At 7:41 a.m. on Oct. 3, James L. "Sonny" Buchanan Jr. was mowing the grass outside a car dealership on Rockville Pike near White Flint Mall. A 39-year-old landscaper who spent most of his life in Montgomery County, Buchanan fell from the seat of his riding mower after being hit by a single shot, again seemingly out of nowhere.

Half an hour later, Prem Kumar Walekar, 54, needed to gas up his taxicab. So the Olney man, who emigrated from India nearly 30 years ago, pulled into the Mobil station at Aspen Hill Road and Connecticut Avenue, as he did nearly every day. He was shot in the chest.

"We had no idea where the shot came from," recalled mechanic Warren Shifflet, who was standing outside with a cup of coffee that morning.

The sharpshooter seemed to be picking up speed. Twenty-five minutes later, Sarah Ramos was sitting on a bench outside a post office near Leisure World in Silver Spring. The 34-year-old housekeeper was waiting for a ride when she became victim No. 4, killed instantly.

Three people dead in less than one hour. In the comfortable suburbs outside the Capital Beltway, a skilled shooter with apparently no pattern to his madness, a random, roaming, frightening sniper was on the loose. The police were just starting to realize the carnage they had on their hands. They had no idea how to stop it.

Just before 10 o'clock, the sniper struck for the last time that morning, at a gas station in Kensington. Lori Ann Lewis-Rivera, 25, was using the coin-operated vacuum to clean her Dodge Caravan. She, too, fit the pattern. She, too, was killed by a single gunshot.

Witnesses would be able to offer few details about the shootings to investigators. All they knew was that each shot came from far away. At the site of Ramos' killing there was one clue. A witness described a white box truck, and trucks matching the description were soon stopped all over the region.

Schools locked their doors and barricaded their driveways. Merchants shut stores early. Shopping centers and gas stations were brought to a standstill by police cars and yellow crime-scene tape.

The epicenter might have been Montgomery County, but residents there didn't corner the market on fear. Even schools in the Baltimore suburbs canceled outdoor recess and after-school activities. Rumors, soon proved false, spread about more shootings as far away as Mount Airy and Towson.

"We don't know who we're dealing with," Montgomery County Police Chief Charles A. Moose told reporters at a news conference after 11 a.m. that day.

Police in jurisdictions outside Montgomery County were telling people not to panic. The killer hadn't strayed from a small radius, and there was no reason to think he would.

D.C. and Virginia

But at 9:15 that night, retired carpenter Pascal Charlot, 72, was walking near Kalmia Road and Georgia Avenue in Washington, just steps from the Montgomery County line. He was buying medicine for his sick wife and lottery tickets, relatives said, when he was killed.

A witness in that shooting saw something: a dark-colored Chevrolet Caprice with its lights off.

But police continued to focus on earlier sightings of a white van or white truck. That was the kind of vehicle often reported by people calling the toll-free tip line set up by police.

The next afternoon, as the world focused on the investigation unfolding in Rockville, a 43-year-old mother of two was loading packages into her minivan in a Michaels parking lot in Spotsylvania County, Va., about 50 miles to the south, not far from Interstate 95. She became the first of the sniper's victims to survive his rifle.

Still, despite receiving hundreds of phone calls, police had no credible leads - none, at least, that they were sharing in their regular news conferences.

The sniper took the weekend off. The fear began to fade. Montgomery County school officials announced that things would be back to normal Monday morning - kids would be free to play outside again.

The shooting had stopped, everyone hoped. No one had been shot for more than 65 hours, no one killed for 15 hours more than that.

It's 'personal'

That's when he struck again.

This time, as Moose would say later, it got "personal."

A 13-year-old boy, being dropped off by his aunt outside Benjamin Tasker Middle School in Bowie, was shot in the torso - a single gunshot. The aunt, a nurse, quickly put him back in her car and raced to Bowie Health Center. He was soon flown to a trauma center in Washington.

The sniper failed. The boy survived.

But the fear was back. This time, the sniper left a clue. A shell casing was found more than 100 yards from the school's entrance, and so was a calling card of sorts: a tarot card, the death card, inscribed with the words, "Mister Policeman. I am God."

Schools were again locking doors. Parents flocked to schools to pick up their children, afraid that maybe school was no longer the safest place for them. Parents stopped letting their children take the bus, driving them instead to literally hand them off to teachers and principals. Walkers were scarce.

If terror was the killer's goal, he was succeeding. If killing was his true desire, he was starting to fail. By Wednesday, no one had died by his hand for six days.

The night of the Bowie shooting, John Allen Muhammad, now charged with murder in the sniper case, quietly moved through Baltimore. While people in counties across the region had trouble sleeping, worrying where the sniper might make his next move, Muhammad slept in his car along 28th Street, more than 40 miles from Rockville. A police officer spoke with him that night and noted Muhammad's name in a report. But the officer went on his way after finding nothing too suspicious about the man.

Wednesday night, the sniper struck again - another gas station, in Manassas, Va., also not far from a highway interchange. A Montgomery County resident, Dean Harold Meyers, 53, was filling his vehicle on the way home from his engineering job. He was shot in the head just as he unscrewed the cap to his tank.

Filling up suddenly seemed like a deadly proposition. People were afraid. They spoke of getting gas far from highway interchanges, of tricks to avoid being exposed to a faraway sniper.

On Oct. 11 - nine days after the shooting began - the sniper killed again, this time in an even bolder fashion. Kenneth H. Bridges, 53, a prominent businessman from Philadelphia, died at a gas station near Fredericksburg, Va., right off I-95, at 9:30 a.m. A state trooper was across the street.

Roads were blocked. White vans were stopped up and down the interstate, several were surrounded and searched by police.

It seemed certain that they would catch the sniper. It would be impossible to get away on a rain-drenched highway clogged by rush-hour traffic.

But he did.

After another quiet weekend, he struck that Monday. On Oct. 14, Linda Franklin, a 47-year-old employee of the FBI, was shot and killed outside a Home Depot in Falls Church, Va., at a busy convergence of highways called Seven Corners. It was 9:15 p.m., and she and her husband were making purchases for the new home they were about to move into nearby.

Then the killer fell silent, for six days. Police first thought that the Home Depot killing would be the big break. A witness gave a detailed account of the sniper - a description of his olive skin, his white van, even his weapon. There was a feeling that police were finally, after two weeks of dead ends, closing in.

The witness was lying. He was arrested and charged with giving false information to authorities.

Meanwhile, profilers and pundits were all over the 24-hour news channels. They kept talking about how the sniper had a pattern: He didn't strike on the weekends.

After five days without a shooting - the longest lull since the killings began Oct. 2 - the sniper showed contempt for all those who claimed to understand him.

He struck on a Saturday.

Communication

About 8 p.m. Oct. 19, he fired from the woods behind a Ponderosa restaurant in Ashland, Va. He was 90 miles from his last strike in Falls Church, 110 miles from where he started shooting in Aspen Hill. A 37-year-old man traveling through town with his wife had gotten off I-95 to grab some dinner. He was shot, but he is expected to survive - only the third of the sniper's victims to pull through.

Another community stood terrorized.

No longer just identified with the Washington area, the sniper had extended his reach all the way to Richmond's suburbs. In Richmond, they closed schools for two days - no other district had taken that drastic a measure - panicked about what had happened and by the note left behind, which demanded millions of dollars and contained threats of more violence.

Its chilling postscript: "Your children are not safe anywhere, at any time."

While police worked quickly behind the scenes, following tips left by the sniper himself and others on the tip lines, Moose held a series of cryptic news conferences in which he spoke to the sniper through the news media. Investigators were getting closer and closer to their killer - but they couldn't work fast enough.

On Tuesday before daybreak, 35-year-old bus driver Conrad Johnson was shot on the steps of his Ride On bus, not far from where the first shootings had taken place. Maryland residents had hoped the sniper had moved on. Instead, the sniper had returned to claim his 13th victim.

Taken into custody

On Wednesday, investigators raced through a series of clues - from as near as Ashland, Va., and as far as Montgomery, Ala., and Tacoma, Wash. - that led them to put out a bulletin for a blue Caprice with New Jersey tags, with two men inside considered "armed and dangerous." Early Thursday, police were called to that Caprice at a rest stop along Interstate 70 in Frederick County. Muhammad was asleep inside. Also taken into custody and later charged with murder was 17-year-old Lee Boyd Malvo.

After three weeks of violence, the rampage ended peacefully.

"I didn't sleep all night long last night. I had CNN on. I just knew something was going to happen. Everything was unfolding in front of my eyes," hairdresser Suzy Cooper said Thursday afternoon. Cooper works at the Images Hair Salon, a few storefronts from where Sarah Ramos was shot as she sat on a bench three weeks before.

"I just kept praying to God those two were it."

'All very hopeful'

On Thursday morning, with suspects in custody, the weight began to lift. It was OK to go to the filling station and even linger at the pump. It was OK not to scan the tree line. It was OK not to be suspicious of the white van in morning traffic.

"We're all very hopeful that this is all behind us," John S. Lloyd, principal of Benjamin Tasker Middle School, said Thursday. "To say the least, I was elated when I heard what happened overnight."

The sniper attacks apparently won't take away Halloween or Election Day, won't force schools to cancel the already abbreviated fall athletic season.

At Suitland High School in Forestville, the Rams' varsity football team is 5-0, having defeated the defending state champions earlier this season. But the three-week hiatus has been tough on coach Nick Lynch and his squad - athletically and otherwise. He liked to have his players with him in the after-school hours, not risking trouble elsewhere.

"It's been very frustrating not only for me but my players, too," he said. "We've been able to do some things in the gym, but with the numbers we have, we've sometimes been walking over each other."

For so many people, life has seemingly returned to normal. For those who lost loved ones to the sniper, however, what was normal is gone.

"I just thought he'd be caught a little more dramatically, but now we might be able to find out why he did it, find out what made him tick," said Rose Wilkes, a dispatch supervisor for Montgomery County police who knew Buchanan, the second victim, and his family for 30 years. "Now we know Sonny wasn't stalked - he was just shot at random."

But, she said, "it doesn't take the hurt or pain away."

Said Lazarus Borge, brother-in-law of cabdriver Walekar: "We didn't want any more innocent lives to go."

Dottie Fitzgerald, president of the car dealership where Buchanan was killed, wants people to counteract the random acts of violence. She wants those around her to start committing "random acts of kindness."

Buy a candy bar for the kid behind you in line at the grocery store. When they call for snow this winter and everyone rushes to the grocery store for milk, bread and toilet paper, she said, buy an extra roll for someone in need. Get to know your neighbors.

"Everyone realizes: 'But for the grace of God, it could have been me,'" Fitzgerald said.