Wisdom of the Bones (2003)

Christopher Hyde's thriller, published by New American Library in 2003, takes Dallas homicide detective Ray Duval through November 1963. A Medal of Honor veteran of the Rangers, Duval has just been told he has congestive heart failure and about six months to live, and he means to save one more life before he goes: a killer is taking girls and leaving their bodies cut apart, and as the assassination of President Kennedy throws the city into chaos, another girl is kidnapped. (Open Library)

Watches

Gruen watch: Sitting in his car, Duval is ambushed by the memory of 6:39 in the morning on Omaha Charlie, when he saw the time on the mud-spattered face of Lieutenant Norman D. Belcher's Gruen as they climbed the cliff. At the top Ray found only Belcher's hand, the Gruen still on its wrist. Ray took the Gruen and wore it, not to steal it but so that something of Belcher kept ticking, for the rest of the war; at home he put it in a drawer, where it ran down and stopped, and it is that neglect, not the death, that brings him to tears. He thinks of the watch again on p. 147. The maker is named; the model is not.

Source text: He’d taken the Gruen off the wrist and put it on his own, not to steal it, but somehow feeling that as long as he wore it a little bit of Lieutenant Belcher was still ticking away, like a pulse. Like a heartbeat. (Christopher Hyde, Wisdom of the Bones, scan cataloged as New American Library (Onyx), 2003, p. 36, where the scene begins on p. 35 and Belcher's Gruen first shows the time; he recalls the watch again on p. 147; Internet Archive scan OCR)