Hour of the Hunter (1991)

J. A. Jance's thriller, copyright 1991, is set in the Arizona desert in the 1970s, and uses the name the Papago Reservation carried then. Andrew Carlisle spent only six years in prison for the torture and murder of a young Papago girl; the testimony of Diana Ladd, a teacher on the reservation, put him there, and now he is out and coming for her and her young son. (Open Library)

Watches

Timex (unidentified model): Carlisle has killed a woman he travelled with past Picacho Peak. Before he leaves he washes her body in a shallow stream, stacks her clothes and sandals, smokes one of her cigarettes, and strips the jewelry from the corpse: three rings, a Timex watch and a gold-chain necklace, taken not for their value but because any delay in identifying her works to his advantage. From her purse and car he later learns that she was Margaret Danielson, Margie for short (p. 73). The maker is named; the model is not.

Source text: He returned to the corpse and removed the jewelry — three rings, a Timex watch, and a single gold-chain necklace — wresting them roughly from the body not because they might be valuable or worth selling but because any delay in identifying the body would work to his advantage. (J. A. Jance, Hour of the Hunter, scan cataloged as Avon Books, 1992, p. 45, with a stray caret in the OCR dropped; Internet Archive scan OCR)