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newspaper away and crossed the side street, continuing down Main. She was just a few steps from her building when she spotted her car in the public lot across the street, a citation on the windshield catching her attention. She’d parked the same car in the same spot at the same time every day for a year and never gotten a ticket. She was sure that she’d fed the meter plenty of change.
    Meter maids on steroids strike again.
    She jaywalked across Main Street to read the bad news. But she soon realized it wasn’t a ticket. Someone had neatly folded a page from the newspaper into a rectangle and left it under the driver’s-side wiper. She slid it out and saw that it was the front page of the Pawtucket Times. The date was September 7, but she didn’t have to check the year to know that it wasn’t an early edition of tomorrow’s paper. The headline read: TRAGEDY FOR PAWSOX STAR . The beautiful young woman in the color photograph staring back at her was Chelsea James.
    Emma had seen the article several times, but it still chilled her—chilled her more than ever before. She wasn’t sure if it was because today was the third anniversary of Chelsea’s death, or because someone had gone to the trouble of leaving an old newspaper on her windshield.
    Emma checked for a signature or a note that would reveal the sender’s identity. She found only a few curious markings. Certain words on the front page were underlined, and each underlining was numbered one through five. Three of the words were from the article about Chelsea, but two of them were from another front-page story. The numbers were not sequential—if she read the words left to right, top to bottom, the number sequence was three-one-two-four-five. But when she read each word in the order of the assigned number, they created a sentence.
    “‘I know who did it,’” she said, reading aloud.
    She checked again for a signature, but there was none. Someone was being cute and clever, but Emma still had to take it seriously for what it might be: a note from an anonymous tipster who claimed to have seen the drunk driver who ran Chelsea off the road.
    She put the newspaper into her trial satchel, careful not to smudge any possible fingerprints, and headed back across the street to the Office of the Attorney General.

6
    IT WAS UP TO EMMA AND THE CHIEF OF THE CRIMINAL DIVISION, Assistant Attorney General Glenda Garrisen, to decide what to do about the anonymous tip.
    “Use the media,” said the chief.
    “We don’t have to reveal the tipster’s unusual MO—the way the message was crafted from underlined and numbered words in a newspaper,” Emma said. “That would just trigger copycats.”
    “Agreed.”
    “The media is the only way for us to communicate with this source. If he’s for real, we want to encourage him to keep talking to us. If this is a hoax, we want to remind him that giving false tips to law enforcement is a crime that we will prosecute.”
    “Emma, I said go for it. So go.”
    It was the green light Emma had been hoping for.
    The Chelsea James investigation might have been cold for some, but for Emma the details remained fresh: the make and model of the car, the street name, the official time of death. She didn’t even have to retrieve the file to draft the press release. By six forty-five it was finished. It was time for dinner.
    She chose to eat crow—and call her Action News “friend” Doug Wells.
    “I need a favor,” she said.
    “Well, isn’t this an interesting turn of events?”
    Somehow, she just knew he was grinning on the other end of the line. “This is important,” she said. “There’s a possible break in one of my cold cases. The Chelsea James accident.”
    “Oh, yeah. The ballplayer’s wife. Very sad. I did a story on that.”
    “Can you run an update at eleven?”
    “If it’s newsworthy.”
    Good answer. She’d almost expected him to say, If you’ll have dinner with me. Emma said, “I’ll e-mail you the press