In the blink of an eye, ATF agents found a piece of blown-away truck axle. In what seemed just moments later, Timothy McVeigh was in police custody. The first hours and days after the Oklahoma City bombing convinced many that justice would be swiftly done. Then real-life rhythms took over. Nearly three weeks after the blast, John Doe No. 2 is still at large, and the immensity of the task facing the feds has sunk in. "It's now down to basic investigation and luck," one official admitted. Said another federal lawman: "I think we may be a year putting this thing together."
For a while, it seemed as if there were as many potential John Doe No. 2s as clowns tumbling out of a circus car. An Australian tourist in Ontario was dragged from his car at gunpoint and questioned for four hours by authorities; a hitchhiker was detained in Ohio; a man driving through Georgia in a BMW with Oklahoma plates was stopped by a local sheriff's deputy. The most colorful detainees, Gary Allen Land and Robert Jacks -- two drifters whose travels mysteriously paralleled McVeigh's in the days before the bombing -- were arrested on Tuesday in Carthage, Missouri, and released 18 hours later. "They were morons, you know," Jacks said of the FBI last week. Still, the authorities continue to rely on tips pouring in to the FBI hot line at the rate of around 1,100 a day. "The American people are going to solve this case for us," says a top FBI man. With the help, that is, of more than 500 FBI, ATF and Customs agents, and police officers on the case in Oklahoma City, thousands of others who have been running down leads across the nation, support staff and lab technicians, and officials still on alert at the borders.
For now, investigators concede, they are not even sure what part of the country the second suspect is hiding in or whether McVeigh -- who broke his steadfast silence last week only to reject two lawyers provided by his family -- is mastermind or pawn. Are the Nichols brothers more deeply involved than they are now charged? Was John Doe No. 2 the ringleader? "Somebody did motivate them," an agent maintains. Furthermore, "he could easily motivate two or three more militia types to do this again somewhere else. You do this two or three times, we'd be chasing our butts. This guy is a national tragedy walking around."
Some bomb experts have concluded that McVeigh and his associates were eager amateurs. According to one investigator, "If they were truly mad bombers, they could have brought the building down, and they didn't do it." The feds also continue to pursue the theory that McVeigh was a member of a close-knit band of extremists impervious to such traditional law-enforcement tools as infiltration and electronic surveillance.
Although the involvement of the Nichols brothers -- who are still being held in Wichita, Kansas, on bombmaking charges -- remains unclear, the evidence linking them to the blast appears to be growing. Agents found a receipt for a ton of fertilizer in Terry Nichols' house; the purchase was made in Kansas under an alias, but Time has learned that a salesman picked out Terry Nichols from a lineup. The receipt has McVeigh's fingerprints on it. According to a government source, the same phony name was used to purchase a second ton of fertilizer. Agents have also found evidence that Nichols bought 55 gal. of diesel fuel.