OPENING SHOTS

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Last November, agents and prosecutors showed Kessinger photos of Bunting in the hat and T shirt. According to the brief, Kessinger has concluded that he was thinking of Bunting when he described the man with McVeigh. Kessinger is "now unsure" whether he saw a second person; Elliott and Beemer "continue to believe that two men came in to rent the truck on April 17." The brief goes on to say both are certain Hertig was not "Kling" because they knew him and because he has a mustache, which Kling did not.

No one disputes that the Ryder truck rented by Robert Kling carried the explosives that destroyed the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building (an axle with a vehicle identification number was found at the site). But was Timothy McVeigh in fact Robert Kling? Jones has argued that the testimony of Elliott and Kessinger is unreliable, since they have been so inconsistent on the question of John Doe No. 2. The government insists that conflating Bunting's visit with McVeigh's was a harmless, understandable mistake and that the identification of McVeigh remains airtight.

Elliott and Kessinger first spoke to the FBI on April 19, when McVeigh was still completely unknown. A composite sketch based on their description of "Kling" was shown to motel owners around Junction City. On April 20, Lea McGown, proprietor of the Dreamland Motel, recognized the man as a guest named Timothy McVeigh. The agents searched a database and discovered that someone of that name was arrested on April 19 for speeding 90 miles north of Oklahoma City; he looked almost exactly like the composite sketch. So, the government argues, Elliott and Kessinger described McVeigh before anyone knew of his possible involvement, and their description was so accurate that the motel owner recognized the man easily.

In the brief, the government adduces other evidence linking McVeigh to the truck-rental agency. Records show that on April 14, 1995, at 9:53 a.m., the agency received a call from a pay phone in a Junction City, Kansas, bus depot. Thomas Manning, who worked in a store across from the depot and sold McVeigh the car he was eventually arrested in, is prepared to testify that McVeigh was in the store but left briefly at about the time of the call. Also, a cabdriver will testify that he drove McVeigh to a McDonald's near the truck-rental shop at 3:29 p.m. on April 17. Videotape from a security camera at the McDonald's shows McVeigh there at that time. "Kling" rented the truck at about 4:15.

The government's star witness, McVeigh's friend Michael Fortier, is not discussed in the brief. But sources tell TIME he will say that he accompanied McVeigh to case the Murrah building and that McVeigh told him he wanted to blow it up. Fortier's wife Lori, these sources say, will admit she helped McVeigh make the phony "Robert Kling" driver's license that McVeigh used to rent the Ryder truck.

It may not look very good for McVeigh. But Jones has a plan. First, he will sow suspicion in the jury about the possibility that someone else committed the crime. Jones points out that in 1983 a white supremacist named Richard Snell killed a pawnbroker whom he mistakenly believed to be Jewish and was executed on April 19, 1995. "Snell had threatened to blow up the Murrah building back in the 1980s," Jones says. "One of the hypotheses is, Did a group of people decide to give the old man a going-away gift?"