Murder at Ford's Theatre Read Free Page A

shook his head. “No livor on her belly. I’d say the deed was probably done right here.”
    Klayman stood and slowly took in the broken macadam and concrete surrounding the girl. He asked Ong from his standing position, “Blow to the head?”
    “Appears that way. More than one. Head, the face. She was beaten quite badly.”
    Klayman summoned one of the evidence technicians with his index finger. “See those prints over there?” he asked, pointing to areas of crumbled concrete where two footprints were visible in the gray dust. “Get those.”
    Inside, Mo Johnson had instructed those gathered on the stage to separate. When they were a dozen feet apart from one another, he asked the group, “Anybody know who she is? Was?”
    Their reply was affirmative. “Nadia,” some of them said. “Zarinski.” “Nadia Zarinski.”
    Johnson raised his hand to cut off the chorus. “Just one at a time. You?” He nodded at Johnny Wales.
    “Nadia Zarinski,” Wales said.
    “She work here?” Johnson pulled a small pad from his jacket pocket and started writing.
    “She was an intern,” someone else said.
    Johnson kept his attention on Wales, his expression urging
him
to continue.
    “Nadia was an intern. I mean, not really an intern. Not here. She’s a paid intern in Senator Lerner’s office. She sort of volunteered here once in a while, a night or two now and then. She liked being around the theatre.”
    “Paid intern?” Johnson said. “I didn’t think interns got paid.”
    “Yeah. Well, she did. Get paid. By Lerner’s office.”
    “Who could do such a thing?” Mary asked.
    “Anybody got any ideas?” Johnson asked.
    Silent shrugs.
    “I want an informal statement from each of you. Has anybody left who was here earlier?”
    “No. Well, Clarise was here.”
    “Who’s she?”
    “She’s the boss.”
    “Where is she?”
    “Up in her office, I suppose. The building next door.”
    Mo Johnson pulled his cell phone from his belt and called headquarters: “This is Johnson. We need backup here. Plenty of witnesses.” He clicked off and told uniformed officers who’d entered the theatre to go next door and round up anyone there, including a woman named Clarise. “She runs the place, I think,” he explained.
    He looked down at the front row of seats. “Come with me,” he told Wales, indicating the stagehand was to follow him down to the house, where they settled into adjacent seats. Johnson asked for a brief explanation of why Wales was there that morning, asking him to describe what he’d seen, and gathered his full name, address, phone number, e-mail address, and other specifics. “We’ll go to headquarters after we get all the informal statements.”
    “What for?”
    “To get your formal statement. So hang around. Don’t talk to anybody except me. Got it?”
    “Yeah.”
    “Next!”
    Klayman entered the theatre after Dr. Ong had released Nadia Zarinski’s body to be taken to his office and lab. An autopsy would be performed that afternoon. The members of the stage crew who’d been questioned by Johnson, or by a backup team of detectives, had been told to take seats throughout the theatre with plenty of space between them, and were instructed to not talk to one another until their formal statements had been taken at headquarters.
    The slight young detective stood on the stage and stared up to the box in which President Lincoln had been assassinated, kept pretty much as it was that fateful night. Klayman was no stranger to Ford’s Theatre. He’d spent many hours there soaking in its historic meaning and listening to tourist lectures delivered by park rangers. The presidency of Abraham Lincoln and his tragic death were passions of his; he’d read countless books on the subject, and attended lectures presented by Lincoln scholars. In the good weather, on days off, or when he convinced Johnson to accompany him with their brown-bag lunch, he enjoyed sitting on the steps of the gleaming white marble Lincoln