The killing season visited another US city last night. The images were disconcertingly familiar, recalling last spring's massacre in a Colorado high school: people lying in pools of blood, hospitals scrambling their trauma teams.
This time the scene was Atlanta, Georgia, in an office complex in the city's wealthy financial district known as Buckhead. The man was Mark O. Barton (44), handsome and smiling in his driver's licence photograph.
Witnesses said he entered the offices of All Tech Trading, a daytrading firm where he used to rent office space and computer time. He casually mentioned to former colleagues that the stock market was having a bad day, and then withdrew a .45 calibre handgun along with a 9mm automatic. He may have had a third gun.
By the time Mr Barton was finished - he interrupted shooting at the first building, then crossed the street to another brokerage firm to start shooting there - nine people were dead and 12 were injured.
A bad enough story and the immediate concern was that Mr Barton had escaped police. A massive manhunt began in Atlanta and across the state of Georgia as darkness fell at around 8.30 p.m. (local time), with no sign of Mr Barton.
Then police went to Mr Barton's home and made another grizzly discovery. His wife, Lee Ann, and two teenage children, Matthew and Shelley, were found dead.
Within hours a picture emerged of Mr Barton and it raised more questions than it answered.
A neighbour at Mr Barton's former home at 6475 Sinclair Lane, Atlanta, said the family had moved just about a month ago.
He seemed like a nice man, said the neighbour, who did not wish to be identified. He had a garage sale and I bought some Bibles from him.
But another image also emerged. In September 1993, Mr Barton's former wife and her mother were found beaten to death in an Alabama camp ground. Mr Barton was a suspect; it turned out he had taken out a $600,000 insurance policy on his wife. He refused to take a polygraph (lie detector) test. Police were never able to amass sufficient evidence and the case remains unsolved.
A former salesman for a chemical company, Mr Barton had apparently lost money in the risky day-trading area. Indeed, investment experts warn that day-trading can be as fraught with losses as with gains.
The idea is to buy and sell stocks within minutes, taking advantage of the current market's volatile ups and downs to make money. Day-traders do not care about long-term investing or value; their cry is: "It's the volatility! That produces gains. . ." - as long as your bet is the right way.
No one knows what set Mr. Barton off yesterday. No one knows if he did kill his former wife and mother-in-law. What America does know is that another man living some life of quiet desperation was able to get his hands on a gun, a 9mm automatic, which is so powerful that its bullets pierce ordinary house walls.
No one knows how Mr Barton got the gun but if he did not have a criminal conviction he could have walked into any sporting goods store in most states, exchanged pleasantries about the weather and walk out with a pistol in his hand.