Powersat

Matagorda Island, Texas

Dan found out about the apparent suicide when he tried to phone Larsen at his cubicle in the engineer’s building that stood next to Hangar A. The man wasn’t at his desk, so Dan asked April to track him down.

She came into Dan’s office nearly half an hour later, her face drawn.

“What now?” Dan asked.

“Pete Larsen hanged himself.”

“What?”

Without Dan telling her to, she sank into the chair before his desk. “I talked with a sergeant I know from the county sheriff’s office. He said that Pete committed suicide. The Mafia or somebody was after him.”

“The Mafia?”

April nodded. “He owed a lot of money from gambling.”

“Pete Larsen?” Dan asked again, incredulous. “He wouldn’t even bet on the Super Bowl pool.”

“That’s what the sergeant said. He hanged himself because he owed money to gamblers.”

Dan frowned at his assistant. “April, you knew Pete. Was he a gambler?”

“I didn’t think so. But the police said he was.”

“And rain makes applesauce.”

“But—”

“No buts, kid. Look. Hannah gets killed in the crash. Joe Tenny thinks it’s sabotage and Joe was trying to figure out who did it. He talked with Pete the afternoon he was killed. That night, boom! Joe is murdered.”

April flinched visibly at hearing the word murder.

“Now Pete’s dead,” Dan continued. “If you ask me, I’d say Pete was involved in the crash, and when Joe started sniffing too close they killed him. Then they killed Pete to keep him quiet and shut off any chance of our finding out who’s behind all this.”

Staring back at him, April asked, “Is that what happened?”

“That’s what I think.” Then Dan realized how tenuous it all was. “Of course, I could be having paranoid delusions. I could be chasing my own tail.”

“Oh no,” she said, her gold-flecked eyes wide and earnest. “You must be right, Mr. Randolph. I mean, I knew Pete Larsen pretty well. I even dated him a couple of times. He didn’t strike me as a gambler. Not at all. And it doesn’t seem right that Dr. Tenny would have an accident with the hydrogen equipment. He designed it himself, didn’t he?”

Dan nodded.

“What are you going to do now?” April asked. “Do you want to talk to the county sheriff about Pete?”

He shook his head. “I don’t think that’d do any good. They’re calling it suicide. Let it rest there. If I try to make a fuss the cops’ll think I’m a crank or, worse, a nut case.”

“And it would alert whoever killed Pete that you’re still after them.”

“Right,” Dan said, his estimation of April rising another notch. Are you part of this? he asked her silently, locking his gaze onto her’s.

“But you can’t track down the killers by yourself, Mr. Randolph. You should get the FBI into this. Or maybe the Texas Rangers.”

“The FBI’s supposed to be investigating the crash. I haven’t seen any action from them, though. Have you?”

Her brows knit slightly. “All right, then. What about a private investigator?”

“I’ve thought about that. I just don’t think that a private gumshoe would be much help. They’re mostly involved in divorce cases, tapping phones and photographing husbands with telephoto lenses.”

“Mitch O’Connell? The head of your security department?”

“Useless for anything more than hiring rent-a-cops and filling out forms. Hell, if our security was any good we wouldn’t be in this fix.”

“I suppose,” she said, sounding disappointed.

“Maybe I ought to talk to the local FBI office and try to goose them up,” Dan said halfheartedly. “I don’t know what else to do.”

April’s slender jaw set in a look of determination. “Let me talk to my father, back in Virginia. He’s a county district attorney and he might know an investigator here in Texas who can do something more than peep through keyholes.”

She didn’t wait for Dan to agree. Instead, April got up from the chair and went straight to the office door, so firmly intent that Dan just sat in his desk chair, speechless.

But he was thinking: Is she one of them? Being my assistant is a good spot for a mole. Is she calling her father, or one of the guys who killed Hannah and Joe and Pete?

April Simmonds was cursed with good looks. From the first beauty contest her mother had put her into, when she was five years old, she had found that she could smile and dimple and everyone would admire her. But as she grew into a shapely teenager and began to understand the power of sex, she started to realize that being beautiful was not enough. Not for her. Yes, the good-looking girls got picked first for the cheerleaders’ squad and teachers excused them for being late with assignments or forgetting their homework. That was fine. But April learned soon enough that others—especially men—didn’t expect anything from a beautiful woman except for her to be pretty. And compliant. They were frightened by a beautiful woman with brains.

April had a first-class brain. At first she didn’t realize this because when she got As in class she (and everyone else) assumed it was because she smiled brightly and caused her teachers no trouble. No one was more surprised than April when she sailed through the toughest courses in high school, including algebra and trig, without the slightest difficulty.

It was much the same in college. Yes, there was some racial trouble now and then, especially when she dated white men. But she handled it without letting it blow up into a major confrontation. She found that she was actually interested in learning about history and English literature and even the dreary courses in economics. Her only difficulty came when she was pledged for a sorority chapter and some of the sisters were unhappy with a tall, good-looking, almond-eyed charmer who made them look shabby by comparison. But she won them over and by the time she was a senior she was elected president of the chapter.

Men were a problem, though. She could manipulate them easily enough: her high school boyfriends were so driven by testosterone that she could have made them bay at the Moon for her, or rob a bank. In college she began to date older men, including professors from the faculty. She wanted to learn from them, learn about the big world beyond the campus, learn about what life had in store for her. Instead, they patted her on the head (or elsewhere) and made it clear that all they expected from her was to be pretty. And compliant. When she tried to talk politics, or art, or anything deeper than the latest Hollywood flick, their eyes went wide with apprehension. And they seldom asked her out again. She got a reputation for being a snob.

She graduated with a degree in English literature and an ambition to do something interesting. The first job she took was as an editor on the magazine published by the state’s tourism bureau. That lasted less than six months. She was asked to leave after showing the editor-in-chief how he was missing some major stories and allowing the magazine to fall into a boring rut. Unemployed, she spotted a news story about a private company in Texas that was building a solar power satellite. Interesting, thought April Simmonds. She e-mailed her resumé (with photo) to Astro Manufacturing Corporation and applied for a secretarial job, the only position she felt qualified for. Within twenty-four hours she received a return e-mail inviting her to fly down to Matagorda Island for an interview.

The personnel chief was a tough-looking older woman with hard, probing eyes and a no-nonsense attitude. But after talking with April for ten minutes, she smiled and said that the CEO and founder of the company needed an executive assistant. April accepted the offer, determined to do her job well but never to let her boss see how smart she truly was.

Then she made her first mistake. She fell in love with her new boss, Dan Randolph. He was one of those rare men who was not intimidated by an attractive woman with brains. In fact, she thought he seemed uninterested in her looks. April got the feeling that he was in love with someone else, someone unobtainable. That made her love him even more.

Now she was determined to help Dan find the people who had killed Hannah Aarons, Joe Tenny, and most likely Pete Larsen, as well. She knew this would be difficult. What she never stopped to consider was that it would also be very dangerous.