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Charley reached for the phone. She should call Bram, she was thinking, although speaking to her younger brother was always an exercise in frustration, and she was already feeling frustrated enough. Especially after his no-show over the weekend, when she’d driven all the way down to Miami in holiday traffic—in south Florida, the holiday extended from December through March—only to find his apartment empty and her brother nowhere around.
    There was a time when this might have concerned her, but no longer. It had happened too often. “See you at eight o’clock,” he’d say, only to turn up at midnight. “I’ll be there Friday at six for dinner,” he’d confirm, arriving the following Monday at noon. Charley had known about the drugs for years. She’d hoped their mother’s reappearance in their lives might help turn things around. But after almost two years, Bram still refused to have anything to do with her. If anything, he was worse now than he’d been before.
    “Knock, knock,” said a woman from behind Charley’s desk.
    Charley swiveled her chair around to see Monica Turnbull, early twenties, jet black, closely cropped hair, a silver loop pinching her right nostril, blood-red nails clutching a plain white envelope.
    “You’ve got mail,” Monica chirped. “And I don’t mean that virtual crap. I mean a real, actual letter,” she continued, dropping it into Charley’s outstretched palm.
    Charley stared at the girlish scrawl on the front of the white envelope, then had to glance twice at the return address. “Pembroke Correctional? Isn’t that a prison?”
    “Looks like you have a fan.”
    “Just what I need.” The phone rang. “Thanks,” Charley said as Monica wiggled her fingers good-bye. “Charley Webb,” she said, picking up the receiver.
    “This is Glen McLaren. I have your brother.”
    “What?”
    “You know where to find me.”
    The line went dead in her hands.

CHAPTER 3
    W here’s my brother?” Charley said, bursting through the heavy front door of Prime, the chichi nightclub that was Palm Beach’s current place to be and be seen. Prime boasted a clientele of mostly young, mostly rich, mostly beautiful—or those whose money qualified them as beautiful—people. They came to mingle, toss their layered blond hair around photogenically, show off buff bodies swathed in the latest designer fashions, and hook up—with old friends, future lovers, and discreet dealers. Charley had referred to the place as Prime Meat in a recent, none-too-flattering column that had done absolutely nothing to slow the club’s ever-burgeoning popularity.
    The first time Charley had visited Prime was in the early morning hours of a late October weekend. Like most people her age, she’d initially found the combination of mirrors and mahogany, loud music and dim lights, expensive perfume and sweating, well-toned bodies, to be amazingly seductive. In the five minutes it had taken to navigate her way through the meticulously under-dressed crowd to the impressively overstocked bar that occupied the entire left side of the room, she’d been approached by a trio of handsome men, a woman with fake, balloon-sized breasts, and a chorus of seemingly disembodied voices offering to sell her everything from Ecstasy to heroin. “You name it, I’ve got it,” someone had whispered tantalizingly in Charley’s ear as a young socialite swayed past her on unsteady heels, white powder still clinging to the underside of her nostrils. Noise and laughter had followed Charley to the bar, stray hands carelessly groped her buttocks as she walked, the continuous beat of the music blocking out conscious thought. Charley had realized how easy it would be simply to give herself over to the meaninglessness of it all, to dance, to drift, to deny…everything.
    I think not. Therefore I am not.
    It had been so appealing.
    But now, in the unflattering light of a rainy morning, the room retained little of its after-hours glamour or