Free Clean Burn by Karen Sandler

in front of the electronics store. “Thirteen last month.”
    I managed not to laugh, although he may have caught my smirk. I scanned the length of Main Street as I climbed from the Explorer. The Greenville Pharmacy still shared space with the post office and Greenville Gazette. Mel’s barber shop had survived the passage of time, although it looked as if Mel hadn’t. A Korean woman swept the sidewalk out front while her husband snipped hair inside. Emil’s Café still promised the Biggest Burgers in the West, the neon hamburger in the window sputtering as it always had. And the National Hotel, a Gold Rush-era holdout, had a new coat of brick red paint.
    Greenville Electronics had taken the place of the hardware store, a town icon that had no doubt been erased out of existence by the big box home improvement store just twenty minutes down Highway 50. The front window displays of shovels, pickaxes and gold panning pans had given way to smartphones, iPads and Android tablets. Posters hawked cellular service and equipment.
    Five boys and one girl – Cassie – clustered around two giant HD TVs and the massive display of a computer, zapping space aliens or kung fu fighters or whatever video-game demons they battled. Cassie had commandeered the computer, her blonde hair pulled back in a ponytail, a small black box strapped to her waist.
    The man behind the glass sales counter – Rich McPherson, I presumed – looked to be about my age. He was a clean-cut Everyman with neat brown hair and a red “Greenville Electronics” polo shirt. When a kid went over to ask for change for the soda machine in the back, McPherson smiled at him and looked him in the eyes.
    Ken headed toward his niece. McPherson likely wasn’t going anywhere, so I figured I’d talk to the kids first. I zeroed in on a skinny, pimply-faced boy on the Xbox to Cassie’s right. “Do you know either of these boys?” I asked, waving the pictures in his field of view.
    His dancing thumbs never stopped their jig as he gave the photos a once-over. “Nope,” he said eloquently.
    I flapped them in his face again. “Are you sure? You barely looked at them.”
    He jabbed at the buttons, right-left, in quick succession. “Black kid, maybe eleven, twelve years old. Short hair. Scar above his left eye. Hispanic kid, two or three, a booger in his nose.”
    I scrutinized the picture. Damn it, the kid was right. I’d just thought it was a flaw in the photo. “Thanks.” I walked behind Cassie to the boy on her left.
    As I interrogated the heavyset kid, Ken and Cassie started a ping-pong match. “Is your homework done?”
    “Why are you always hassling me?”
    “Did you finish your homework?”
    “I don’t have any.”
    “Don’t have any because you finished it?” Ken’s voice rose. “Or because you’d rather play video games?”
    “There’s one little page of math. I can do it later.”
    As they continued to bicker, I moved along the line of intrepid game players, striking out at each one. Cassie had fallen into sullen silence by the time I turned to her. She flicked a cool glance in my direction before focusing on her game again.
    No smoke pouring from Ken’s ears, but it was a near thing. “I asked did you check your blood sugar?”
    She stamped her foot when her gambit with a nasty puce space alien failed. “It’s fine, Uncle Ken. I just tested it. Lay off.”
    “Turn off the game a minute, Cassie. I want you to meet someone.”
    She huffed with impatience. “You can’t just turn off the game, Uncle Ken. I have to get to the next level first.”
    “Pause it or I’ll pull the plug.”
    She scowled, but she did as he asked, turning toward us to give me a dismissive examination. “Finally picking brains over beauty in your girlfriends, Uncle Ken?”
    Ouch. Before Ken could scold, I smiled and put out my hand. “Janelle Watkins. I was your uncle’s partner in San Francisco.”
    “She profiled the Samantha Trenton kidnapper,” Ken told his