By ELIZABETH VALK LONG President

Last week's indictment of Oklahoma City bombing suspect Timothy McVeigh surprised hardly anyone. But events breaking around the indictment did present an unpredictable opportunity to TIME correspondent Patrick E. Cole, who began covering the Oklahoma City story hours after the April 19 explosion. Unexpectedly, Stephen Jones, McVeigh's attorney, gave Cole permission to interview William and Jennifer McVeigh, his client's father and sister. "I always wonder how the accused and the family feel when they're in the spotlight," Cole says. "Getting to the McVeigh family for their first in-depth interview was thus all the more exciting."

The suspect himself added to the excitement, balking at the interview at the last minute because he did not want family members answering questions about him. Jones' associate, Robert Nigh Jr., hurried to the El Reno prison near Oklahoma City and persuaded Tim McVeigh to let Cole proceed. McVeigh may have relented, in part, because he trusted the correspondent's work; he had answered a set of written questions from Cole the week before that resulted in an exclusive TIME interview.

Cole found the father and sister nervous as the session began: "They were careful about saying anything that could be used against Timothy." The McVeighs relaxed on other points. "The nicest surprise of the interview," Cole says, "was when the McVeighs pulled out a stack of snapshots from their family album that the fbi hadn't got hold of." These photographs gave Cole a privileged look at a "typical working-class family" that may have nurtured a terrorist.

Cole, 39, owns a set of credentials that have aided him in reporting on Oklahoma City and its aftermath. A Notre Dame graduate, he went on to earn a law degree at UCLA. But the lure of journalism, which he had felt as a teenager, reasserted itself, and he took a job 10 years ago at the Akron (Ohio) Beacon Journal as a staff writer. Stints at Business Week and Bloomberg's Business News followed before he joined Time in 1992 as a correspondent in the Los Angeles bureau.

"All along, I wanted to cover legal issues and important cases," Cole says. "The Oklahoma City bombing story has allowed me to use my legal background in a perfect way. When you deal with lawyers like Jones, you understand how they develop strategy." The case against Tim McVeigh will take many months to unfold, and Cole is grateful for his "bird's-eye view" of this process. So are his colleagues and readers.