OKLAHOMA CITY: AFTER THE BOMB : Ceremony Ends Rescuers’ Role at Bombing Wreckage : Oklahoma City: Blast scene is quiet after 16 days of probing for life. Their work in the rubble done, firefighters, investigators bid an emotional farewell.

After 16 days of waning hope and gnawing doubt, a time that had seemed both instantaneous and interminable, one of the nation’s most agonizing rescue missions on Friday finally, mercifully, came to an end.

Like a skeleton picked clean of flesh, the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building had given up all of the bodies it was going to relinquish. There were no more search teams combing the rubble. There were no more hydraulic shovels removing slabs of concrete. There were no more illusions that anybody alive would be pulled from the pulverized wreckage left by America’s worst terrorist attack.

For an hour Friday afternoon, just before a fierce thunderstorm rattled the heavens, hundreds of rescue workers and law enforcement officials gathered before the silent structure to bid it farewell. For many, it was the first time since the April 19 blast that they had really examined the building, free now of the noise and dust and smell that had marked their frenetic 24-hour-a-day search.

“It’s like when you go to a funeral,” said Mike Remkus, a firefighter from the neighboring city of Edmond. “I guess you look at the casket.”

With necks craned skyward, he and others strained to take in the startling scale of the destruction, their eyes darting from the last mound of rubble on the street to the sheared facade rising nine stories above. After a while, it looked less like an office complex than the guts of some war-torn power plant--a dizzying maze of electrical wires, twisted rebar and dangling heating ducts.

A file cabinet could be seen perched on the ledge of one floor, its open drawers still filled with documents. On the ground below, the paper silhouette of a toddler’s left hand, probably traced and cut out at the America’s Kids day-care center, lay trampled in the gravel. Uniformed agents--Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, FBI and Drug Enforcement Administration--all snapped photographs, this time not to record a crime scene but to paste in scrapbooks as a reminder of an investigation they will never forget.

“I said I wasn’t going to cry,” sniffed Maj. Dwayne Doolittle, a member of the Oklahoma City Fire Department’s honor guard. “But I did anyway.”

The ceremony, hushed but for the plaintive wail of a kilt-clad bagpiping troupe, was billed as a moment of closure for the many officers who spent the last 2 1/2 weeks in the rubble, first searching for survivors, then for their remains. But like most aspects of this disaster, the wounds continue to fester, swathed in uncertainty.

In all, searchers recovered 164 bodies, 19 of them children. Four infants were found in the final hours of the mission late Thursday night, providing rescue crews with some weary relief. Yet they called off the search without finding the last two missing victims, thought to be entombed in a corner of the building too precarious to excavate.

Both of them were employees of the third-floor credit union, said Ray Blakeney, director of operations for the state medical examiner’s office. One, Christi Rosas, had begun work only eight days before the blast, and the other, Virginia Thompson, had started with the credit union in January.

Officials are hoping to expedite the process of issuing death certificates for the two women, so that family members can attend to such considerations as life insurance, even though there is no body to identify.

“I’m not sure how accepting I’d be if I was a family member,” conceded Blakeney, who said he was personally distraught over informing the women’s families that their loved ones were lost. “But I believe they accept (that) we have done everything humanly possible to recover everyone in that building.”

In the hope that they might later be found, federal agents will paint the rubble around the area where the bodies of other credit union employees were recovered. After demolition crews begin plowing through the wreckage, they will shift gears and comb that spot more carefully, said Maj. John Long, a city fire spokesman. “They will find them when they clear away the building--if they can be found,” he said.

Still unresolved, however, is the fate of the federal building, which stands like an open gash through the heart of downtown. Although President Clinton has indicated that he will rebuild the structure, many Oklahomans want to see it demolished forever, the site cleared and transformed into a memorial park.

For a brief time Friday, it became just that. City street crews began the day by dismantling a makeshift shrine that had sprouted on a corner several blocks away and reassembling it at the base of the rubble.

As if he were packing precious china plates, Larry White carefully loaded a cardboard box with more than two dozen small teddy bears, then lifted it onto a flatbed truck that he and his crew normally use to fix potholes. Several times, he had to wipe tears under his sunglasses. When he came upon a pair of baby shoes with white daisies stuffed inside, he had to stop altogether.

The idea was to place the outpouring of sympathy closer to the building, where more than 3,000 relatives of those who perished inside are expected to file by in a somber procession today.

Times staff writer Tony Perry contributed to this story.