Time Slips Into Agony for Waiting Relatives : The missing: Few hold out hope for more survivors. But not knowing makes closure impossible.

With hope waning that any survivors remain inside Oklahoma City’s federal building, numbness gave way to frustration Friday as relatives of the missing began to realize they would have to wait days, and possibly weeks, for all the victims to be extricated and identified.

The official death toll rose to 65, but the identities of only 13 victims have been confirmed by coroner’s officials, who have struggled to reassemble severed limbs and match newborn footprints to a dozen small children lying in the refrigerated trucks that serve as a makeshift morgue.

As many as 150 bodies are still believed buried in the rubble-strewn tomb that was once the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building, a horrific toll made even more excruciating by the uncertainty tormenting the families of those who disappeared in Wednesday’s massive blast.

“A lot of people don’t know whether to hold out for hope or give up,” said Stewart Beasley, an Oklahoma City psychologist, who is counseling grief-stricken families. “There’s no closure. There can’t be. They don’t even have a body.”

All that Steve Eckles wanted was a picture.

On Friday, he came downtown with a camera around his neck, desperate to photograph the mangled structure in which he fears his 4-year-old daughter, Ashley, is lost.

“That’s her gravemarker, that’s all I got,” said Eckles, 43, as he dabbed his eyes with a soggy tissue. But police officials, who have tightened their grip around the perimeter of the bomb site, refused to let him get close enough to take a clear shot.

“They were pretty insensitive about it,” he said, stroking the hair of his 6-year-old son, Zackery. “They told me to clip out a picture from the newspaper. But it’s only going to mean something to me if I can take it myself.”

Standing dejected outside a security checkpoint, Eckles described the last three days as a sleepless hell, hoping for the best, bracing for the worst, knowing that none of it will make any difference until he can be sure Ashley is either dead or alive. In his palms, he cradled a small picture of her, blond bangs and cherubic smile framed by an Easter bonnet and frilly pink gown.

“I need to know one way or another,” said Eckles, whose daughter had gone to the federal building’s Social Security office with her step-grandparents, also among the missing. “I can’t go on like this for weeks.”

He has called every hospital in the city. He has gone to every crisis center. He has scanned every list of the dead and the injured. He has even tried to get inside the morgue, hoping to determine if his 40-pound, 3 1/2-foot little girl is inside one of the child-size body bags.

“As bad as it might be in there, it would at least put my mind at ease,” he said. “Parents know their children. A parent could tell.”

Despite the coroner’s painstakingly slow progress, officials said they would never consider allowing grieving relatives inside the morgue, where bodies are so disfigured that visual identification would be neither scientific nor easily stomached.

A team of nearly 100 forensic doctors has now been assembled to examine the victims, many of whom were found with shards of shrapnel, glass, wire and plastic embedded in their skin and clothes, said Ray Blakeney, director of operations for the state Medical Examiner’s office.

“This is an absolutely overwhelming situation,” Blakeney said outside the First Christian Church, where about 200 anxious relatives waited for news inside. “I have to remain clinical, or I’ll break down and go in there with the families and cry.”

He said doctors were relying mostly on dental records, X-rays and fingerprints to help identify the bodies, most of whom were federal employees and have fingerprints logged in government computer banks. An FBI squad of fingerprint specialists from Washington has arrived to provide assistance.

But the effort has been hampered in some cases by severely dismembered bodies, said rescue workers. Children, 13 of whom have been transported to the morgue, pose a special challenge because few have medical records that can conclusively prove their identities.

Doctors have asked parents of missing children to provide them with footprints, usually made by hospital workers as a memento after birth. In a few instances, officials have even sent fingerprint crews into the homes of missing infants, trying to remove latent prints from books and toys that could be used to match the corpses.

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“People are seeking answers and we can’t provide those answers to them,” Blakeney said. “It’s extremely frustrating.”

Red-eyed rescue crews continued to dig furiously through the federal building wreckage, bringing in jackhammers to shatter huge concrete slabs and erecting a steel cage on a crane outside the sheared facade that allows workers to move up and down among the nine stories.

City fire officials tried to sound an optimistic note, holding out hope that survivors could still be found inside pockets that might have formed within the collapsed structure. But that prospect seemed increasingly remote as the 72-hour window of opportunity closed this morning. No signs of life have been detected since a 15-year-old girl was pulled from the rubble late Wednesday night.

“We’re not sure there’s not survivors in there,” said Assistant Fire Chief Jon Hansen, sounding almost as if he was trying to convince himself. “There’s no way we’re gonna say that there’s no hope.”

Steve Gullett, a volunteer from a cave-rescue squad in Missouri, said there was satisfaction even when the bodies had no pulse. Having experienced the anguish of losing his own mother and daughter to violent crime, he said he understood the importance of simply finding the victims, of at least giving a human form to someone’s vanquished hope.

“Not knowing is the most painful part,” said Gullett, a dust mask strapped across the brim of his hard hat. “I know about death and I know about grieving. You can’t begin grieving if you don’t know what you’re grieving from.”

Throughout this stunned city there were signs of unity, leading one radio news host to marvel at the “strange state of grace that has settled over this community.”

In a spontaneous show of solidarity, motorists began turning their headlights on early in the day, transforming the clogged streets into a seemingly endless funeral procession. Along the freeway, a woman pulled to the shoulder to tie yellow ribbons around the lampposts. High atop the hollow federal building, someone had posted an American flag.

“The first day I was feeling pretty bad,” said Police Sgt. John Avera, who carried a 1-year-old from the wreckage Wednesday morning. The infant didn’t survive, but the mother was still grateful. “It helped meeting her last night,” Avera said Friday. “The ‘thank you’ from her was more than I could ever hope for.”

Lurking behind that communal spirit was a mounting sense of anger, however, an emotion that psychologists described as a natural evolution in the grieving process.

Richard Nichols, 37, is a maintenance man at the Regency Tower apartments, a high-rise structure adjacent to the bomb site. Although he and his family escaped serious injury, he now finds himself bristling at the thought of what happened, a recollection that makes his jaw muscles clench with vengeful fantasies.

“What I mostly feel is anger at those sons of bitches who did it,” he said, a fierce look in his eye. “I’d like to take them to the top of that building and push them off. If they were still alive, I’d take them up again and push them off. I would hope they wouldn’t die ‘til at least the fifth time.”

For Keith Coverdale, it’s too soon to think of revenge, not while he’s still clinging to the hope that his two boys, Elijah, 2, and Aaron, 5, could be found alive. They were at the federal building’s day-care center Wednesday morning, while Coverdale, a truck driver, worked a job in Atlanta.

On Friday, he stood in the bright sunlight wearing a Super Bowl cap and pointed to photos of his children in front of a phalanx of reporters. He licked his lips and swallowed hard.

“These are my sons,” said Coverdale, 35, trying not to drift into the past tense. “I don’t want them to be forgotten, regardless of what . . . condition they’re found in.”

The true agony for him, like the families of the other 200 or more estimated victims, is that at the current pace it will likely take weeks to find out.