I've got at least another 30 years of newspaper reporting ahead of me, but I already know some of the stories I'll remember most. The election of Episcopal Bishop Gene Robinson. Covering the state's abortion case at the U.S. Supreme Court. And last week's hunt for the mummy baby.

Here's why: I'm more reporter than writer, and those three stories were tough to land. But none was harder than the mummy.

It took me six days of knocking on strangers' doors and calling my best contacts to find the mummy. At a daily paper, that's an eternity.

The initial tip came on a Friday, the busiest day in a newsroom, and I was in the middle of two stories. "You ready for this?" the tipster said. "There is a mummified baby in Concord. The Concord police got a call. That's all I know."

"Mummified baby??!!!" I said. (My nearest office-mates started gathering.) This tipster, whom I identify only as "my source" even at home, shares my penchant for the unusual. My source is resourceful but didn't have a name or street address.

The next step was obvious. I called Lt. Walter Carroll, the press contact at the police station and told his voice mail I was calling about a mummified baby. "I know that sounds crazy," I think I said. "But is it true?"

Instead of calling me back, as Carroll later told me, he went to his detectives and chewed them out, assuming one of them had leaked the news. (It wasn't them.) Confirmation came a few hours later quite unexpectedly.

At around 4 p.m., someone called the newsroom to say a friend had just found a body off Hall Street, in the woods. (This is how Fridays go on the crime beat.) I put mummy baby aside to follow the other body.

A death often means the state attorney general's office is involved, so I called Jeff Strelzin, the chief of the homicide unit, to see if he knew anything about a body turning up in Concord.

"Ummmm, I wouldn't say the last few hours," Strelzin said. "I know of a body, but it's not, ahh, recent." Without realizing it, Strelzin had confirmed the rumor of mummy baby.

"Oh, I don't mean the mummified baby," I told Strelzin. "I mean a different body."

There wasn't time to delve into the mummy right then. And Strelzin didn't know of a body being found off Hall Street. It turned out we had been tipped before he had. The Hall Street remains would later be identified as Lorne Boulet, who had been missing since 2001.

Mummy's the word

After the weekend, I returned to the office, wanting to work on nothing but finding the mummified baby. Daily papers don't afford that luxury, so I put out calls in between other stories.

I gathered a few more clues. A day care had alerted the police. There was a rumor the mummy was found in someone's attic. Concord's a big city with a lot of attics, and I still had no name, no address. I was getting nowhere calling people I knew in the day-care world. Ditto for my reporting contacts who tend to hear things around town, like Larry Morgan, the manager at Concord and Royal Gardens. When Morgan stopped laughing, he said he hadn't heard about a mummified baby.

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