]  

“Just the suit? No one in it?”

Dickson looked perplexed. “Bothers you huh? Me too. I can’t figure out why a pilot would carry something like that as an extra. Oh, well, it’ll all come out when we really start investigating.”

“How long does a thing like that take?”

Dickson shrugged. “A couple of days, a week. Even a few months. It’s hard to say.”

Brice nodded, took a final drag on the cigarette and tossed it toward the wreck, watching the red ash burst near the wreck. Dickson had wandered off to the far side of the crash-made clearing. Hell, Brice thought, I’d better get that butt. Leaving a thing like that around here could get me in trouble. They’d think it was part of the crash.

When he walked over to retrieve the butt, he saw the light from the flood glinting on a small gold object. He picked it up and found that he had someone’s watch. The crystal had been smashed, likely in the crash, and the hands were stopped at 4:15. The expansion band watch dispelled his hunch that the pilot of the plane had been a Russian, or something; it was a Bulova, and he didn’t think Russians had them. But what cinched the whole thing was on the under side of the face, in the light of the spots, he could read: “To Nick, Love, Beth.”

And suddenly, it was there! He knew the watch. He knew it as well as he knew his own. Hell, he had picked it up at the jeweler’s shop in Everett, two years before, when Beth hadn’t been able to get into town and wanted to surprise Nick with it! Stunned and puzzled, Brice dropped the watch into his pocket and decided not to say anything to Cartwell and Morgan. Maybe it would cost him, [p53]  later, but he couldn’t tell them - not until he had a better picture of what the hell was going on.

[p53]  

[p

]  

He lit another cigarette and stood there thinking about the watch. How had it gotten here? Nick didn’t know how to fly a plane, and even if he had studied the art, could he fly an aircraft that cleared a speed of two thousand miles per hour? Hell no! Nor had the watch been there, in the weather, all this time.

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