Now there were names. John Allen Muhammad - aka John Williams - and John Lee Malvo. The first was a 42-year-old veteran of the Gulf War. Malvo was his 17-year-old stepson. There was a specific car, too, a blue or burgundy 1990 Chevrolet Caprice with New Jersey plates: NDA-21Z. The cops wanted badly to talk to them about 10 murders.

And when the names were sent out to the public, there was a need to believe that the cops around the nation's capital were nearing endgame. The two men were not named as suspects. The cops just wanted Muhammad and Malvo to call 911 and they'd be right over. The cops wanted to talk to them. The cops wanted to find out what they knew about the sniper who for three terrible weeks had been waging war on the routines of ordinary life.

One victim of a sniper's rifle was mowing a lawn. Another was sitting on a bench. A woman was loading groceries into a car. A man was filling a gas tank. Another was leaving a restaurant. A driver was standing on the steps of his bus.

And then a single shot was fired from dark woods, tearing into a human body, ending a life.

As the cops waited to speak with Muhammad and Malvo, 10 ordinary citizens were already dead, and three wounded, and the faceless shooter still moved freely through his spooky piece of America. For decades, that world has been depicted with chilly mastery by the writer Stephen King, whose stories are so often set among the highways, gas stations, fast-food joints, schoolyards, and car lots that make up American geography beyond the cities. King looks at that geography and finds fear.

Earlier yesterday, policemen also visited another piece of that world: a home in Tacoma, Wash., not far from Fort Lewis, where John Muhammad apparently was once a soldier. The house had aluminum siding, like so many homes in King's fictions. There was a tree trunk in the yard, riddled with old bullets, and the police arrested the tree trunk, cutting it apart and taking it away in a U-haul truck. John Muhammad once lived in the house, presumably with his stepson.

The place looked as ordinary as the lives of the victims. It did not look like a place where horror could be spawned. But since Oct. 2, when the sniper gunned down a 55-year old Vietnam veteran named James Martin near Silver Spring, Md., he has driven a new kind of fear into the American imagination.

After Sept. 11, 2001, the American mantra was simple: Live your normal lives, or the terrorists will win. In the suburbs of the nation's capital, people lived their normal lives, and were suddenly murdered or mutilated by bullets. On the day after the first sniper killing, five more were shot dead. Sept. 11 told us we could die while reaching for an English muffin at an office desk. The Beltway Sniper tells us we can die while mowing the lawn.

Now the entire national discourse is absorbed with the man who hunts humans. Everything else has been shoved aside: Iraq, the Middle East, North Korea, growing unemployment, the erratic stock market, next month's elections. Around the world, from Bali to the Philippines, the "war" on terror is being lost and not many pay heed. All such subjects have been pushed to the margin, and this should not be a surprise: Stephen King sells more books than Richard Holbrooke.

As the endless chatter of experts fills cable news (one of these blathering heads actually used the phrase "the sniper community" the other night), a sense of proportion is also being lost. The number of dead in the D.C. suburbs has not yet matched the horrendous toll last Monday in Karkur Junction in Israel, where suicide bombers killed 14 in a few savage seconds and wounded more than a hundred. That story was gone in a day. And the bombers in Bali slaughtered 20 times more in one night than the sniper has killed in three weeks, but their deeds have drifted away like smoke.

Now the tale of the American sniper has turned another page. The police will almost certainly like to know where Muhammad and Malvo were on the days of the shooting. They'd like to know where they live, and how, and make a close inspection of their lives. They'd like samples of their handwriting, to see if the penmanship matches the notes left behind in the dark woods.

From early on, police have suggested that the Beltway sniper might be two people: a driver and a shooter. Whoever he is - alone or with an assistant - the shooter is at the heart of the melodrama he created with his deadly rifle, and must be feeling a certain narcissistic sense of mastery. He warns his American audience that none of their children are safe. He demands $10 million. He sneers at the incompetence of the police telephone operators, or is enraged because the operators didn't listen to him. He blames the cops for three of his murders. He says he is God.

He almost certainly was watching Charles Moose at the police chief's noontime press conference, where more media were assembled than at the UN, where the issue was war against Iraq. He almost certainly stayed up late watching Moose speak cryptically before midnight. He must have heard the chief utter the demanded phrase: "We have caught the sniper like a duck in a noose." He surely heard the chief ask him to try again to make a call. He heard the chief say, "Our word is our bond."

The sniper-as-author, the sniper-as-God, might have been chuckling. And, yes, he might have imagined one final apocalyptic eruption: killing men, women and children at random in one final ghastly day-long spree. Turning a TV movie into a Sam Peckinpah epic. Killing them while they eat ice cream cones, or aim basketballs at garage hoops, or stroll to the mailbox for the morning paper.

We've reached the moment in the script that demands the appearance of one other character: the arresting officers.

That's the way it always happens in cheap fiction. It never happens that way in Stephen King.