Blast Investigators Follow Trail of Guns and Money : Bombing: Officials say ‘timeline’ may be key to scope of conspiracy. Was it contained or part of bigger network?

The maid suspected that Timothy J. McVeigh was hiding someone or something when he would not let her inside his Utah motel room.

The Hertz manager thought it odd that Michael Fortier said he was broke when he rented the Crown Victoria, then paid his bill in cash when he returned the car halfway across the country three days later.

And when federal agents looked inside a 55-gallon drum in Terry L. Nichols’ garage in Kansas, they could not help but be surprised to discover a safe deposit key stolen months earlier from a gun collector in Arkansas.

For the last two months, investigators slowly have been trying to determine how an itinerant band of anti-government loners had financed an odyssey that they believe ended at the federal office building in downtown Oklahoma City, where a gigantic bomb claimed 168 lives on April 19.

Slowly, the pieces are falling into place. A major part of the puzzle now emerging is a series of road trips in which the group may have helped fund its efforts by obtaining and hauling stolen firearms and other illegal weapons around the country.

The men’s attorneys and families have insisted that the three never acted outside the law and Fortier himself has been charged with no crime. But investigators believe that the meandering circuit of gun shows, weapons caches and private sales in these months could help provide a key to the scale of the deadly conspiracy.

If these trips generated enough money to pay for the truck-bomb attack and other costs, investigators could move closer to the conclusion that the plot was small and contained, self-sponsored and executed. If not, the full-scale quest for outside funding and additional supporters must continue in search of a larger network of people who might be responsible.

At this juncture, determining where the plotters “came up with the money is vital,” said one source.

Thus, a special federal task force has been set up to trace the movements of the suspects and their friends in the months before the bombing. The agents are compiling a “timeline reconstruction” of their activities.

In addition to learning the possible sources of money, one federal source said, investigators hope to pin down whether the suspects’ activities “themselves involved criminal violations”--potentially important for leverage in building prosecutions.

One source said it is possible that no more than $3,000 was actually needed to purchase the bomb’s main ingredients of fertilizer and diesel fuel. “And,” he said, “if you throw in the cost of some flop-houses and travel, it’s still a less-than $10,000 operation.”

But the sources of even that small a sum, and their possible culpability, still are not fully known.

“Every stop seems to lead us to a new stop and more questions,” said one federal source. “Guns were their avocation. It seemed their livelihood, too.”

McVeigh and Nichols now sit in a federal prison in Oklahoma, the only two people formally charged in the bombing that also injured hundreds of others. Fortier, meanwhile, is talking with the government about a possible deal to secure his cooperation as a prosecution witness against the others.

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The three became friends in the Army. Each left the service in the last few years with a lingering bitterness for the federal government and an abiding love for weaponry that they had been trained to use.

Court papers filed in the bombing case describe the relationship between Nichols and McVeigh: “Over the years they have occasionally lived together, operated a business together involving the sale of Army surplus items and firearms at gun shows throughout the United States and otherwise stayed in close contact.”

At a May 18 preliminary hearing for Nichols in El Reno, Okla., FBI special agent Errol Myers testified that Nichols--who surrendered two days after the bombing--said that “he and McVeigh had gone to gun shows together and sold things.”

As far back as August, 1993, McVeigh, who often used the aliases of “Terry Tuttle” or “Tim Tuttle,” advertised for sale a military-style weapon in the Spotlight, the publication of the ultraconservative Liberty Lobby organization.

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The ad offered for sale a light anti-tank weapon that fires 37-millimeter flares and flares that could be modified for use as explosives. Also for sale was a “pepper spray key chain.” The vendor was a “T. Tuttle” who used a Kingman, Ariz., mail drop. Kingman is where McVeigh lived and worked alongside Fortier.

The next month, McVeigh operated a vendor’s booth at a Phoenix gun show.

Some of the material sold at the shows can be obtained from military surplus outlets. But federal sources as well as many firearm enthusiasts say that the exhibits often include some trade in stolen weapons.

Bombing case investigators are focusing particularly on the robbery of a gun collector in Arkansas who lost weapons, military equipment and precious gems valued at $70,000.

Authorities said that a total of 68 firearms were taken from Roger Moore of Royal, Ark., after he was struck on the back of the head on Nov. 5, bound and gagged with duct tape and plastic restraints, then forced to lie still while his home was ransacked. Garland County Sheriff Larry Selig said that Moore described “one, maybe two, suspects” dressed in “full military camo’s, gloves and black ski masks.”

Moore told investigators that he believes McVeigh may have been behind the robbery. Although he does not think McVeigh was his assailant, he suspects that McVeigh set him up. He had met McVeigh earlier on the gun show circuit and he said McVeigh visited his home in Arkansas several times and was familiar with his collection.

The following month, in December, Fortier suddenly took a vacation from his job at a Kingman hardware store and announced that he was going to Florida. Instead, he turned up on Dec. 17 at the Hertz rental counter in Manhattan, Kan., not far from Nichols’ home in Herington, Kan.

Ron Hardin, the Hertz manager, said that Fortier and another man wanted to rent a large van. No vans were available, so the two men asked for the “largest car we had,” Hardin said. They rented a Crown Victoria.

Hardin said that Fortier told him he had hitchhiked to Kansas to visit friends at Ft. Riley. He said he had no money and rented the large sedan with his credit card.

But, Hardin said, when Fortier returned the vehicle three days later in Kingman, he paid the $360 bill in cash.

Fortier never returned to his job at the hardware store in Kingman. His friends thought that odd, because he had a wife and young daughter to support. By March, he was dressed in camouflage clothing and selling weapons at a gun and knife show at the county fairgrounds in Kingman. He also was selling military surplus directly and through the mail.

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The FBI later inspected the Crown Victoria, including its large trunk. A source said that a trace of gun oil was found inside the car. Other federal sources said that the car may have been used to haul weapons from storage lockers rented in Kansas to another locker that Nichols and his ex-wife kept in Las Vegas.

Regarding the second man who was with Fortier at the Hertz counter in Kansas, Hardin said: “I can’t say beyond a shadow of a doubt that it was McVeigh. But he had that short, military-style haircut.”

McVeigh appeared at the Dixie Palm Motel in St. George, Utah, on the last weekend in February. He registered under his own name but gave his address as “Ft. Sill, Kan.” There is no such place. However there is a Ft. Sill, Okla., just southwest of Oklahoma City.

Norma Phillips, the motel manager, said that she and housekeeper Ann Mitchell became suspicious when they noticed McVeigh coming and going with a friend in McVeigh’s large Pontiac station wagon. They were upset because he had not paid for two people.

On the second day of his stay, Phillips said, the maid tried to enter the room but McVeigh would not open the door. “He was trying to hide something,” Phillips said.

That same weekend there was a gun show at the Dixie Center in St. George. Show operator Jeff Templeton could not be reached for comment. But his secretary, who would not give her name, said that no one named McVeigh was a vendor or signed in as a visitor at the St. George show.

But asked if someone named Tim or Terry Tuttle was there, she said: “We’ve given all that information to the FBI. We’ve told them everything we know.”

As for Nichols, he first publicly surfaced two days after the April 19 bombing when the FBI announced that it had taken McVeigh into custody. He agreed to let agents search his Kansas home and they found a wide assortment of 33 firearms, some of the same make and model as those taken in the Arkansas robbery.

In a barrel in Nichols’ garage, investigators also found a safe-deposit box key stolen along with Moore’s guns in Arkansas. Although the Arkansas theft remains an open investigation, Sheriff Selig said that there is a strong link between illegal gun-running and the bombing. “I think that’s how they supported it and paid for it,” he said. “I think that’s how they funded it.”

Serrano reported from Oklahoma City and Ostrow from Washington.