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Notes -
I think the real answer might just be that the nature of the investigation was such that it was going to take a lot of time no matter what, unless they were extraordinarily lucky. In most criminal investigations you can narrow the suspect pool pretty quickly and get enough information to start looking at individuals more closely. Here, the only chance of being able to do that was if there was an eyewitness who was able to provide a description of the perpetrator, or a credible tip, and it appears that neither was in play in this case. So you're looking at the tedious prospect of having to examine license plate scans, cell phone tower data, and credit card information, which implicates thousands of people, but not to the extent that you can get a search warrant or anything.
And then to make matters worse you have a ton of people in from out of town which means more rental cars than usual, which adds an extra step, but more importantly makes it more likely that the materials weren't sourced locally, so now instead of chasing pipe bought in the DC area you're looking at every hardware store that sold the stuff across the country.
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