Carole also told the police that when she arrived at his parents’ house, a little after 6 P.M., Dalton was in the garage on the phone. He told her he was reporting the damaged car—to either Uber or the insurance company, she assumed.

But it appears she was wrong.

There is a strange coda to Maci’s experience with Dalton: At 6:09—nearly 30 minutes after Dalton shot someone he presumably assumed was Maci and left her for dead—he called back the real Maci. Perhaps he’d realized from her texts that she could not have been the woman he had just left on the ground.

Maci said that they spoke for nearly three minutes, and she described how the call ended: “He was, ‘Sorry, I don’t have time for this anymore. I have better things to do, and you’re just wasting my time, and I basically can’t do this anymore—you can call someone else [for a ride].’ ” Mostly, Dalton was unpleasant. “He was really sketchy and rude,” she recalled. “Like, he was extremely rude to me.”

The Daltons lived on the northwest corner of a rural junction in the Kalamazoo suburbs. Since they moved in 17 years ago, their one direct neighbor had been a machine mechanic named James Block. He was just as mystified as everyone else.

Block told me that when the Daltons first arrived, they kept to themselves, but a couple of years later, after they had a baby boy, they opened up more. Or Jason did, anyway. “He was a talker. A ten-minute conversation turned to 40 minutes, easily. He was so sociable. He would never actually let you leave.”

Block was the person who insisted that one widely circulated rumor, accepted as fact—that Dalton liked to fire guns out of the back of his property—simply wasn’t true. Sometimes it was folks hunting coyotes in the wooded land back there; other times it was actually Block himself. “I got a target thing back here so I can shoot my gun,” he said. “I mean, I got an AK-47 and stuff.” (Block, for the record, has 13 guns.)

After that terrible night, Dalton’s wife and children had moved elsewhere, but Block said that he had seen Carole several times since, when she’d come by to pick up stuff from the house. They’d talk about the kids and the dogs. Once they’d gotten everything, she told him, they were never coming back.

AFTER LEAVING his wife and children at his parents’ house, Dalton headed to the family home. At about seven that evening, his neighbor’s daughter saw the car in his driveway, idling for a few minutes with its lights on. Then it sped down the driveway, stopped for 30 seconds, reversed fast back up the driveway, then parked with the lights on for five more minutes.

Whatever was going on in Dalton’s mind, his trip there seems to have had a practical purpose. Later, when the police searched the property, they would find the Glock with which he had shot Tiana Carruthers, lying on a workbench; it appeared to have jammed. Now, as he drove away, Dalton was carrying a replacement inside his coat pocket—a Walther P99 9-mm semi-automatic. He would be needing a gun that worked, because he wasn’t done yet. Not nearly.

Still, anyone trying to understand what he was thinking may struggle to comprehend what Jason Dalton did next: He started picking up Uber fares again. And his passengers in this period didn’t notice anything about his behavior that might suggest what he’d done over the last few hours: two high-speed accidents, a cascade of bullets fired at a stranger.

At 8:02 he picked up Keith Black at his home near the Western Michigan campus and took him into the center of town. Black sat in the passenger seat and made small talk. Another passenger, later that hour, remembered Dalton singing along to the radio. At 9:21, when he picked up a fare at the Fairfield Inn, next to Cracker Barrel, and took three passengers to the Beer Exchange in town, he couldn’t get his app to start and the fare wasn’t charged properly, but he seemed easygoing enough about it, like it wasn’t a big deal. He seemed to be doing his job as though nothing had happened and nothing else would.

James Block and Jason Dalton would greet each other every morning, as Block ferried kids to school and Dalton headed to work. They had their final substantial conversation, for 20 minutes over the fence, only two days before the shootings. One of many online eruptions about the case was sparked by the discovery on Dalton’s Facebook page that he was listed as a “Progressive.” Finally, a mass shooter who couldn’t be stereotyped as some kind of a right-wing nut: Look! You liberals do it too! Then someone pointed out that Progressive was actually the name of the insurance company Dalton used to work for. After that, the default assumption seemed to be that he would turn out to be a right-wing nut after all. But that seems unlikely as well.

“He never told me if he was a Republican or a Democrat,” Block explained, though he recalled that during their last conversation, they did discuss politics. “He goes, ‘Man, look, we have a choice between Trump, Hillary, Bernie Sanders…’ He never mentioned Cruz. He goes, ‘Look at our choices!’ He was like, ‘Man, who are we supposed to vote for?’ We both laughed about it.”

TYLER SMITH was 17. He had spent most of Saturday looking for a car with his girlfriend of nine months, Alexis, also 17; in the evening, his father, Rich, a plumber, joined them to see what his son had scoped out earlier. Tyler and his father both loved cars, but they were also looking for something they could use to go into business together. There’s a strip of dealerships along Stadium Drive, and as the time neared 10 P.M., they pulled into Seelye Kia. Tyler and his father got out to look at a blue Ford pickup truck parked right by the entrance of the closed dealership. Less interested, Alexis stayed in the backseat of their Range Rover, which was pulled up next to the pickup truck with its lights on, engine running. As though the three of them wouldn’t be more than a moment.

What happened next could be seen on the showroom’s surveillance cameras from several angles. Dalton enters the frame, drives around the lot and parks in front of the dealership offices, then approaches the father and son on foot, walking past the Range Rover, apparently without seeing Alexis. He was almost upon the Smiths before they noticed him.

Dalton later said, mystifyingly, that he had gone into the car lot because he felt compelled to look at a black BMW. This is exactly how, according to the police report, Dalton explains the subsequent change of plan that actually made him a killer for the first (and second) time: