Still, she understood what Christopher was doing. If this man was mostly worried about the risk of the theater being closed, that was good motivation for him to give them all the information that he could.
“Why don’t we start over?” Paige suggested. “We still don’t have your name, sir.”
“Evans,” the big man replied. “Andrew Evans. This is my theater. At least, I manage it.”
“And you were the one to find the body this morning?” Christopher said, obviously catching Evans’s comment about nearly having a heart attack.
“Like I said, I walked in, and I saw it. Saw her.”
There was a flicker of pain in his voice, and now Paige wondered if his eagerness to get all of this over with might be a coping mechanism, if he was trying to just get through it because the thought of what he’d seen disturbed him too much. Maybe this wasn’t all about the money for him.
“Can you walk us through that?” Christopher said. “What was the theater like when you walked in? Were the doors locked? Was it dark, or were the lights on?”
“The stage door was unlocked when I showed up,” Evans said. “And there were spotlights pointing down at the stage. There was a mirror set up on it too that shouldn’t have been there. That was when I saw… her.”
Paige felt a moment of sympathy for him, having to see something like that. Paige knew from experience just how difficult it could be.
She also found herself looking over to the stage. A large mirror was still set up there, at the foot of the stage, angled upwards. Paige frowned, not quite understanding.
“Is this another part of the trick?” she asked.
Christopher was also frowning. “This is a different trick, mixed in. It’s one called Pepper’s Ghost. It uses carefully angled mirrors to make the magician appear to be somewhere they’re not. It’s even older than the bullet catch.”
Paige guessed that it would have meant that Clarissa Bale didn’t know which direction the attack was coming from until it was too late.
She returned her attention to the theater manager.
“Tell us more about what you saw when you came in,” she said. “Was it usual for the lights to be on like that?”
“I thought that someone had come in for some kind of early rehearsal, or maybe Lucas had come in for one of his late night hookups and left the lights on.”
“Late night hookups?” Paige said. There hadn’t been anything about that in the file.
“One of the stagehands likes to bring girls back here after hours,” the manager said. “He thinks it impresses them more than his apartment, or maybe he just doesn’t like them knowing where he lives. He swiped a key from my stage manager a couple of years back and I never got around to changing it.”
“Or firing him,” Paige said. “You don’t mind him stealing from you?”
She saw the manager shrug.
“He’s good at his job and he does anything that needs doing while he’s here, so it works out for me,” the manager said.
“Do all of your employees get to use the theater after hours?” Christopher asked.
“Of course not,” Evans said. “You think I’m just going to give everyone who wants one a key to this place?”
“So who does have keys?” Paige asked.
Evans looked a little put out by the question. “What? You’re going to start accusing my staff of something like this? Isn’t it obvious that someone broke in to do this?”
Christopher shook his head. “Like you said, you found the door unlocked. Had it been damaged? Forced open?”
Evans shook his head. “No, I guess not.”
“So who had keys?” Paige pressed him.
That got another shrug from the manager. “At this point, it’s just me and Lucas. One or the other of us is always here to open up or lock up.”
Which reduced the pool of potential suspects considerably, assuming a key had really been used.