My apartment was what I would call new, though by Miami standards, it might be a few scant years from the wrecking ball. It wasn’t to my taste-small, antiseptic and cold, painted in grays, whites and blacks, with spare modern furniture-but was in a trendy South Beach neighborhood and, for a girl like Faith Edmonds, location was everything.

I got back to the apartment just in time to change my clothes and place a few calls.

I phoned my editor first. Benicio had provided me with the details of a werewolf cult in Fort Lauderdale that I was supposedly investigating, possibly linked to the murder. His people would give me more later, so I could write the article. He’d booked a room at a Fort Lauderdale hotel in my name, with the phone forwarded to my cell. He was even having a young female employee drop by the room daily, to establish my alibi.

Normally “I’ve taken off to Florida chasing a story” isn’t something you tell your editor, not without getting permission first, but I had a good relationship with my boss. I liked my job, gave it 100 percent and had no intention of vanishing at the first offer from a more respectable paper. In the world of tabloid journalism, that’s employee-of-the-year material.

Naturally, he chewed me out. Then “get your ass back here” became “fine, but this is on your dime, Adams.” By the end of the call, it had changed to “save your receipts, but if I get a bill for the Hilton, you’re on proofreading duty for a year.”

The next call I made was a dozen times harder. I hate lying to my mother, though it was nothing new. We’d always been close, and still talked for twenty minutes a day and met once or twice a week, but there were days when I felt like an impostor who’d replaced her youngest child. There was just too much I couldn’t share with her.