Cat's Claw (1992)

Cat's Claw

Chelsea Quinn Yarbro's mystery, a Jove paperback cataloged as 1992 and credited on its cover to C. Q. Yarbro, is the fourth Charlie Moon novel. Charles Spotted Moon is a San Francisco attorney who also practises the medicine his grandfather taught him on the Iron River Ojibwa reservation, and his client Jared Eden is suspected of being the Gold Chain Killer. (Open Library)

Watches

Rolex watch

Facing arrest, Jared Eden pulls off his watch and presses it on his lawyer for safekeeping: a Rolex from his grandfather, worth over twenty-five hundred dollars, which he does not want the police to touch. When Charlie handles it at home the gold is, to his medicine, thrumming with death. He locks it in his wall safe on a chalice of salt (p. 205) and later, in the steam of a sauna, summons its memories: the killings, and Jared at his dying grandfather's bedside taking the watch from the dresser and putting it on (pp. 231 to 237). He hands it back and tells Eden what the watch has told him (pp. 242 to 243). The maker is named; the model is not.

Source text: It's my Rolex. I got it from my grandfather. It's worth over twenty-five hundred dollars. (Chelsea Quinn Yarbro, Cat's Claw, scan cataloged as Jove Books, 1992, p. 199, from Eden's speech; Internet Archive scan OCR)