Vixen

PROLOGUE

Femme fatale. French for “deadly woman.”

You hear the term a lot these days, usually in connection with noir fiction and film noir. Brigid O’Shaughnessy in The Maltese Falcon. Cora in The Postman Always Rings Twice. Phyllis Dietrichson in Double Indemnity. Matty Walker in Body Heat. Catherine Tramell in Basic Instinct. Scheming, sexually demanding vixens who trap their lovers in bonds of murderous desire and use them to further their own ends. Lethal women. Jezebel, Salome, Cleopatra.

But they’re not just products of literature, film, the folklore of nearly every culture. They exist in modern society, too. The genuine femmes fatale you hear about now and then are every bit as evil as the fictional variety. Yet what sets them apart is that they’re the failures, the ones who for one reason or another got caught. For every one of those, there must be several times as many who get away with their destructive crimes.

In the dozen years I spent in law enforcement and the thirty-some years I’ve been a private investigator, I never once had the misfortune to cross paths with this type of seductress. Never expected to. Never thought much about the breed except when confronted with one in a movie or the pages of a book or the pulp magazines I collect. Female monsters of a different variety, yes, like the middle-aged pair I’d encountered not long ago who made a living murdering elderly people for their money and possessions.

But a femme fatale in the classic mode? Not even close. If you’d told me that one day I would, and that her brand of evil would be like nothing I could ever have imagined, I would probably have laughed and said no way.

I’m not laughing now.

Neither is Jake Runyon. He was mixed up with her, too, in the same professional way I was, not quite from the beginning but even more deeply and all the way to the end. He’d never come across anyone like this particular vixen, either, and it left him as shaken as it did me.

Her name was Cory Beckett. Real name, not an alias. A deadly woman who brought a couple of new twists to the species.

New-and terrible.