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gather up every bit of information you have on those bomb threats and have it ready for us to pick up when we come back later on this afternoon.”
    “But why? I thought you were investigating the murders. What does that have to do with the bomb threats?”
    “Maybe nothing, but then again, maybe they are connected. I want everything you have, regardless of its seeming importance, understand?”
    Savage nodded. “Right,” he said. “Everything. You’ll have it.”
    Detective Kramer was already standing poised by the door when I got up to follow him.
    “Way to go,” he said under his breath as I followed him out the door and down the hall. “Glad to see you can put the screws to somebody when you feel like it.”
    I’m sure Paul Kramer intended that remark as a compliment, but to me it didn’t feel like something to be proud of. My mother wouldn’t have liked it either.

Chapter 4
    T he address Doris Walker had given us for Alvin Chambers was in the North End. With the streets blanketed by snow and ice, getting there proved both difficult and hazardous.
    It was midmorning now. The City of Seattle no longer appeared to be a ghost town. Despite the frigid cold, the pale crystal blue sky lit by brilliant sunshine had tempted at least a few intrepid souls into venturing outside. Some were making justifiably belated attempts to get to work, while others, especially children in a holiday mood, took advantage of their unexpectedly lengthened Christmas vacation to play in the morning’s winter wonderland.
    Seattle drivers don’t get nearly enough experience at driving on snow and ice to be any good at it. What little they learn during one year’s major storm never carries over to the next. We didn’t even make it off Queen Anne Hill without passing several minor spinouts and accompanying fender benders. A departmental traffic advisory warned us that both Aurora Avenue and northbound I-5 were tied up with accidents, so we cut across town on Mercer Street, aiming for Fifteenth Avenue.
    With Kramer driving, we had just passed the intersection where Queen Anne Avenue North meets Mercer when a sled loaded with two laughing kids came flying down Roy Street and zipped across the street directly in front of us. It was sheer luck that we didn’t crush them under our tires. Had the timing been even so much as one microsecond different, there would have been nothing Kramer or anyone else could have done to avoid hitting them.
    “Jesus Christ!” Kramer grumbled. “What the hell do those crazy kids think they’re doing?”
    “Stop the car,” I told him. “I’ll go set them straight.”
    “Bullshit,” Kramer responded. Instead of slowing down to let me out, he accelerated and reached for the radio. “Kids on sleds are Traffic’s problem, not ours. We’re Homicide, remember?”
    “If someone doesn’t stop them, it could very well become Homicide’s problem,” I returned grimly.
    In fact, during the past few years, the number of snow-related deaths in the city had taken an alarming swing upward, particularly due to sled/motor vehicle accidents.
    It would have taken only a moment to give those kids the dressing down they so richly deserved, with the added side benefit of maybe saving their young lives, but Detective Kramer was driving. Intent solely on the case at hand, his type A personality allowed for no diversions or distractions, not even potentially lifesaving ones. Disgusted, I listened while he reported the near-miss incident to an already vastly over-worked traffic dispatcher.
    “They’re not going to have time to do anything about it,” I muttered when he finished.
    “We’re not either,” he replied.
    I could see that working together wasn’t going to be a picnic for either one of us.
    It took us more than an hour to make what normally would have been a simple twenty-five-minute-ride to the North End. The object of our drive turned out to be a modest two-storied complex called Forest Grove located a