I WAS RELISHING THE SOLITUDE OF MY own apartment on a rainy Sunday morning, reading the Times and filling in the answers to the puzzle. My telephone tape had been loaded with messages from friends but I didn’t intend to start returning any of them until later in the afternoon. I had unpacked my suitcase and had nothing that needed doing other than to organize my notes and police reports for the week ahead.

Mercer’s call caught me in the middle of noshing on a toasted bagel. “Hey, Alex, it’s me. Two things, one you may be able to help me with.”

“Shoot. You sound like you’re on another planet!”

“I’m on a cell phone up in Connecticut. Drove up to my cousin’s house for a family party today. Almost forgot about it. First thing is, I got beeped by a little police department in Pennsylvania. Bluebell, to be exact. Seems like DuPuy made a U-turn somewhere near the Mason-Dixon line and reversed his tracks. Coming back north.

“Commissioner’s concerned enough about it to be moving Maureen again to a different location, just as a precaution. Everyone assumes he’ll start using a new credit card or ID any hour now. Steal one, buy one, con one off somebody. Surprised we’ve had this much of a run on him using the Perkins cards.”

“Maybe he’s coming back to get his wife and kids.”

“Well, that’s a very generous view of the weasel, but it’s a point. There’s a tap on her phone and the lieutenant’s had a team sittin‘ on the house since we heard he fled.

“Which leads to my question. Peterson asked me if we had inventoried the files in Dogen’s office and apartment. I told him that you and I took some notes but they were pretty general. At least mine were by topic, not by specific name. He wants to know if she had a folder on John DuPre. And, frankly, I couldn’t remember. Sound familiar to you?”

“Hold on. I can look through my materials and check it for you right now. Off the top of my head, I know I was listing the categories of things she had but I don’t remember even seeing any individual names.” I was trying to visualize the reams of documents we had plowed through that afternoon and whether the neurologist’s name would have had any significance to me at that particular point in time.

“Not that important. I tried to reach George Zotos but he’s upstate fishing with some of the guys from his old squad. He was goin‘ through a lot of them with us that day.”

“Just give me a minute and-”

“It’ll keep ‘til during the week. I can promise you the Chief isnot bringing me back in on my RDO unless there’s a major break in the action.” Regular days off were sacred in the NYPD’s high command, since the rate of a second-grade detective’s overtime scale was quite costly.

“Okay. Have a good time at the party.”

I hung up, refilled my coffee cup, and took it into the bedroom while I showered and dressed. I thought I might walk around the corner to the Frick Collection for an hour or so and threw on an old cashmere sweater-a pale yellow cable-stitched tunic-over some velvet leggings to dress myself up a bit for the weekend art crowd.

I poured one more hit of coffee from the pot and sat at the dining-room table reviewing the notes I had jotted down while talking with Geoffrey Dogen. It bothered me that Lieutenant Peterson had questions about the files in Gemma’s apartment for which I didn’t have answers, especially since I had offered myself to go there to look for information that might be relevant to our case. I was even more annoyed that I couldn’t make a connection between some of the file names I had seen and facts that Gemma’s friends had not been able to fit into her life.

I didn’t have any way to get into Dogen’s office at Minuit without alerting the hospital administrators, but her own house keys had been sitting on top of my dresser ever since the afternoon Mercer had taken me to her apartment almost ten days before. I had forgotten to return them and no one had needed to claim them on her behalf. Rent was paid up through the end of this month and Geoffrey Dogen had sent directions to donate her clothes to a thrift shop and have all her other personal belongings packed up and shipped home to England for distribution to relatives and friends.

I walked into the bedroom to call a couple of my girlfriends to see if anyone wanted to meet me at the Frick. It was a toss-up whether to just hang out for a few hours or try to accomplish something useful on the case by spending some time in Dogen’s files. I picked up the miniature model of Tower Bridge and played with the keys as I dialed the familiar numbers. Lesley Latham’s husband told me she was in Houston on a business trip, and Esther Newton was on her way out the door to a Huskies game at the Garden.

If I went down to Beekman Place and detailed information from Gemma’s records, I told myself, then I’d deserve a late-afternoon visit to the museum-see the current exhibit and pick up some new postcards to send Nina-and a stop for a cup of hot chocolate on my way home. I left a message on David Mitchell’s tape telling him I was back from London and asking if he and Renee wanted to come in to watch60 Minutes this evening. Then I called Mike’s machine to pass on the news from Mercer about DuPre’s change in direction.

Still undecided about which route I would take, I stuck a blank legal pad in my tote, dropped in the key chain, and put on my hooded red rain slicker. The museum was only four blocks away, but as I stood in the drizzle on the corner of Park Avenue waiting for the light to change a gentleman in a green mackintosh coat stepped out of a yellow taxicab and made it easy for me to shift course.

The cab discharged me at the entrance to Dogen’s building. I saw only one doorman inside the lobby. I smiled and started to approach him to explain my purpose but he barely looked up from hisDaily News comic section, so I continued on back to the right and waited for the elevator to descend and bring me up to the twelfth floor.

The nervous feeling I had experienced when I first came to the apartment with Mercer fluttered back as I knew it would. This time, it was just the spookiness of being alone with the keepsakes and belongings of the dead woman, which didn’t seem to hold much meaning or value for any of her heirs or acquaintances. How odd for the accumulation of such an interesting life to pass with so little notice or concern.

The double locks gave easily as I turned a key in each of them. Once again I was startled by a noise behind me, but this time it seemed to be the door resounding as it slammed shut at my back. I thought of William Dietrich and the other people who still might have had Gemma’s keys, so I twisted the lock and chained the bolt before throwing my slicker onto the back of an armchair.

Things were more or less as I had left them on my earlier visit. I knew that detectives had been in and out of here on a number of occasions since then on orders from the lieutenant, but whether the superintendent or rental agents had scavenged any of Gemma’s belongings I doubt I’d be aware. I spent a few minutes walking from room to room looking for differences that I might notice but finding few.

The book on spinal cord injuries was no longer on the bedside table and the closet door in that room had been left open, revealing its empty innards. I put my finger on the bottom edge of a furled-up yellow Post-it someone had stuck onto the wooden trim around the closet with a handwritten arrow pointing beneath to the words, “Deliver to Hospital Thrift Shop, Third Avenue.”

Back in the living room, I looked at the photographs with renewed interest. Now I could pick out the faces of Geoffrey Dogen, Gig Babson, several colleagues from Minuit, and London backdrops of Gemma’s favorite setting. Books and CDs were still in place, but someone had made off with the disc player and the little television set I had seen there last time. I took out my notepad and wrote a reminder to find out whether the removals were authorized or not-a typical problem at the scene of a homicide when there was no family member to keep up a presence.