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distribution of prescription drugs—controlled substances that were resold on the streets. She spent her time researching case law and preparing for trial to convict the people responsible for the record-breaking number of deaths related to the abuse of prescription drugs. The victims of this epidemic spanned the spectrum of race and intelligence, wealth and poverty. Most of them fraudulently obtained prescriptions from doctors by faking pain, some of them visiting different doctors daily to get their fix.
    Rae was also tracking the illegal sale of those same drugs. Just as some people obtained numerous prescriptions for their own use, others acquired them solely to resell them. Some stole prescriptions from family members. And some health-care workers stole the medications of unsuspecting patients in order to make a quick buck.
    On the streets, Vicodin and Percocet were sold beside heroin and cocaine. Some drug addicts were now hooked on painkillers, without ever having seen a doctor for a prescription. Scarier still, these pills had become the drug of choice for experimenting teenagers. They somehow seemed safer than injecting or smoking, and those pills were prescription , so how bad could they be? Kids in high school and college were overdosing on these drugs and ending up just as dead as the ones who used the hard-core drugs. People were now dying more from prescription-drug overdoses than from any other source.
    It all started innocently, with pills gifted from friends, who’d stolen them from home or bought them, and soon they were stealing and buying their own. Like most mind-altering drugs, though, these narcotics enslaved them, changing the shape of brain receptors so that higher and higher doses were required to achieve the same effects. Then boom! A kid ingested a few extra tabs and stopped breathing.
    Finding the proof to prosecute in these overdose cases was often difficult. Friends and parents destroyed or consumed the evidence, wanting to protect their loved one or get high themselves. In a few cases over the past six months, though, Rae’s office had uncovered some alarming information. Someone had illegally manufactured the pills recovered at death scenes, pills that resembled the trade-name samples on the market but contained differing quantities of narcotic and fillers.
    Since that discovery, her office had been working hard to discover the source of these pills. They were used all over the region, but if one marked the areas on a map, it formed a near-perfect circle, Philadelphia at its center. These illegally manufactured pills were being distributed out of Philly, and she intended to find out the who and the what and the where, and shut it down. Too many lives had been lost, and Rae wouldn’t rest until she changed things.
    She hadn’t always felt this way about drug users. She’d had no exposure to the kind of people who abused drugs, and she’d always assumed they were shadowy criminals who chose their dark path. She’d thought users were much to blame for their plight. After all, without buyers, no one would be selling drugs, right?
    Since she began working for the DEA she’d learned how wrong she’d been. Dealers preyed on the innocent, indoctrinating them into the drug culture when they were most vulnerable. Their targets were children of single parents, recruited to deliver the product, kids without much guidance or money in their pockets. Most eventually became users. They were the mentally ill, failed by social systems and modern medicine, who turned to street drugs to control depression and anxiety and hallucinations of all varieties. They were veterans, unable to cope with the horrific memories of war, turning to drugs and overdosing at alarming rates. They were teens who were bullied, or pressured by parents to perform, or didn’t fit in, turning to drugs to help them cope. They were all sucked into the vortex of prescription-drug use, which caused about a hundred of their deaths