SOMETHING BIG IS GOING TO HAPPEN

True, Timothy McVeigh didn't hold a steady job, but he never seemed to want for money. In the days leading to the Oklahoma bombing, he paid cash for his motel room in Junction City, Kansas; he paid cash for the Ryder truck that allegedly carried some 5,000 lbs. of explosives to Oklahoma; and he forked over $250 (and his old Pontiac) for the Mercury he was driving when he was arrested. In Kingman, Arizona, the owner of the trailer park where the suspect lived in 1993 says he saw McVeigh flashing around "a big wad of money." Investigators have told Time that McVeigh possesses some $10,000 in cash and bank accounts. The money, along with the precision and power of the explosion, are leading the feds to believe that McVeigh and his missing accomplice -- still known only as John Doe No. 2 -- were far from lone bombers. Instead the feds suspect the men were members of some sort of organized extremist group that provided them with financial and tactical support. McVeigh, say federal law-enforcement officials, could not have masterminded the plot alone. "He's not smart enough to have thought it would come out the way it did," one investigator told TIME.

For now, however, he is dedicated enough to his comrades and their cause to keep his mouth shut. Imprisoned at the El Reno Federal Correctional Institution in Oklahoma, McVeigh, when questioned, responds only with his name, his rank and his date of birth-obeying, as it happens, the instructions for pows in a manual published by the Michigan Militia. Even when confronted last week with photographs of the children carried from the crumpled Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building -- some bloody and numb with shock, others already dead -- McVeigh appeared unshaken. The accused bomber seems to have decided that he is a prisoner of war.

The criminal investigation into the Oklahoma City bombing may be proceeding without the cooperation of McVeigh, but it continues to lead to him. Last week U.S. magistrate Ronald Howland denied him bail and said "an indelible trail of evidence" linked McVeigh to the crime. Eyewitnesses place him near the scene of the bombing before the 9:02 a.m. blast on April 19. An fbi agent has testified that McVeigh's clothing tested positive for traces of explosive materials. With McVeigh in custody, the most urgent question facing federal agents is where else -- and to whom -- that trail leads. John Doe No. 2 remains missing, and may have left the scene of the bombing in a car with Arizona license plate No. LZC646-a number originally assigned to McVeigh.

The search for clues now runs from Kansas to Michigan to Arizona to Wisconsin to California. One possible new angle is that the bombing was financed by a series of unsolved bank robberies throughout the Midwest; in some of these incidents pipe bombs were left at the scene. Other investigators have turned to Paulsen's Military Supply in Antigo, Wisconsin. When McVeigh was arrested in Perry, Oklahoma, he left the store's business card in the patrol car. The father-son Paulsens are gun traders and may deal in the small explosive devices needed to set off bombs. Most important, the authorities are pursuing a theory that the plot was hatched by McVeigh and some former Army buddies from the First Infantry Division at Fort Riley, Kansas, where both McVeigh and Terry Nichols served. Nichols and his brother James remain in custody as material witnesses.