“I didn’t notice anyone behind us,” he informed me in the same tranquil voice.
“Me, either,” I said, though I hadn’t been looking very hard. I hadn’t wanted to see if someone was there.
If anybody was, I hoped they absolutely hated walking. I hoped they’d have blisters for days.
We took the subway uptown, stopping to pick up sandwiches and a bottle of wine at a deli next to the hotel, and didn’t leave the room again that night.
Chapter 11
“We made it,” I said, as the shuttle pulled out. We were all crammed in together, those of us on our way to Rikers Island. There were a few other pairs like us—mothers and children, adult couples—but most of the riders had come alone.
It had been an easy trip to get here: we caught the subway near our hotel and rode straight through until we reached our stop. It was long past the morning commuter rush, so we’d found seats without any problem. Once in Harlem, we’d circled the block several times rather than wait on the corner for the shuttle, just on the chance that a) someone was on our trail and b) we might be able to lose them if they were. Not that my heart was really in it. I’d sort of gotten used to the idea that we were being watched.
Last night we’d gone over what we would ask Michael Sorenson. Peter would take the lead, unless it seemed like I needed to, but either way we’d try to stick to the plan, such as it was. Of course it was all moot if he refused to see us, wasn’t allowed visitors, or someone else registered to visit him first.
We were silent on the fifty-minute drive. It was too crowded for easy conversation, so I leaned into Peter’s shoulder and looked out the window. I kept remembering the last time I saw Mike, as I thought of him. The only time. Naked and scraggly and mean. Pushing Marianne up against the wall with a hard, sinewy arm. Screaming epithets into her face.
The memory didn’t exactly make me eager to see him again.
Having grown up in the Bay Area, the concept of an island prison wasn’t a strange one. Except that Rikers Island was still in use, while Alcatraz had all the charm of a slightly gritty, highly scenic tourist destination. The shuttle finally made the turn onto the long bridge that led to the island, past the oddly bright orange and blue sign, and after a few minutes we’d reached our destination.
It was different from what I expected. Less imposing, more like a military base. There were city-like streets curving around wide areas of grass, multistory buildings that could have been apartments or dorms, administrative offices. The shuttle pulled up in front of an unassuming structure that looked a lot more like a DMV than a jail, except for the large sign across the top proclaiming “New York City Department of Corrections” and all the uniformed officers around. The double doors were open and barricades had been set out as guards began the process of checking people in. A small line had already formed, swelling quickly as the shuttle passengers joined it.
Once inside, it was even more like a DMV. First we waited our turn to lock up our belongings. We’d read up on the procedures and had brought a dollar’s worth of quarters with us for the lockers, changed by the hotel front desk. I’d left my purse behind, so we only had our phones and wallets to lock up.
We went through the initial security and search, then made our way to the waiting room of the jail where Michael Sorenson was incarcerated. Here we checked in with our IDs, received our Visitor Express Passes and were told that a shuttle bus to the jail proper would leave in about twenty minutes, then sat down in plastic chairs until they called us for the bus. Apparently there would be no problem seeing Michael Sorenson. We could only hope, now, that he was the right person.
“They’re planning to close this place down, you know,” Peter told me quietly. “Turn the whole island into mixed-use development.”
“Really?” Sitting here, it was hard to imagine the prison not existing.
“Who knows if they will, but the idea keeps getting tossed around.”
After a short ride, the shuttle dropped us off at the door to the jail. We went through a second set of metal detectors and were told that we’d need to lock up any other loose possessions, including jackets and jewelry. We had none to remove, and again sat down to wait. There were fewer people here, though every thirty minutes or so another shuttle arrived, until the waiting area had filled. Now and then names would be called by a guard and people would disappear into a secure area. An hour passed.
When my name was finally called, I jumped and scrambled to my feet, holding out my pass to show the guard. He checked it and nodded, then led me to a small room with a bench in one corner before shutting the door.
“Please remove your shoes and socks… Open your mouth… Lift up your hair… Show me your sleeves…” With the utter dispassion borne of frequent routine, the man snapped through the instructions, then told me to put my shoes and socks on and wait, shutting the door behind him. I sat down in the little room and complied. Everything about this was utterly surreal.
After a few minutes, the door opened and a different guard and Peter stood outside. He led us through two more high security doors into a long, light room surrounded by windows to a table about halfway down, then told us where to sit. There were four or five other visits going on, prisoners in orange jumpsuits on one side of the tables—all men—and visitors on the other. I could barely take any of it in.
Peter said nothing. I could tell he wasn’t as calm as he seemed, noticing the tightness of his mouth and determination in his eyes. I didn’t know where to look, so I looked at him.
“I shouldn’t have made you come,” he whispered.
“You didn’t make me,” I whispered back. “I wanted to.”
“It was my idea.”
“It’s our only lead.”
A door at the far end of the hall opened and a guard came in, leading a prisoner. They walked over to our table and the prisoner sat down.
“Hey,” he said, eyeing us with understandable curiosity.
I stared at him. I couldn’t help it.
The past five years hadn’t been good to Mike Sorenson, but even so I recognized him. His hair, which had been long and dirty, was buzzed short and receding off his forehead. He sported a neat goatee and some kind of scrolling tattoo on his neck. He looked tough and worn at the same time. His eyes, which I only remembered as being enraged and bloodshot, were a startling light blue. He must have been very handsome when he was younger, I realized. I hadn’t noticed at the time, distracted by too much other nastiness.
“I’m Peter, and this is Lola,” Peter said.
“Uh huh. Should I know you?”
“We think you used to know our friend, Marianne DiGregorio.”
Mike leaned back in his chair, considering us.
“I knew Marianne, yeah. A long time ago.” His eyes focused on my face and narrowed. “You showed up once. At the loft.”
It wasn’t a question. He recognized me, too. I’d had a forlorn hope that he might have been too drugged out to register the encounter.
“Yeah,” I said.
“Your face rang a bell when you said Marianne’s name.”
“I was only there a couple of minutes.”
“Really? What happened?” He genuinely seemed to want to know.
“Nothing—you yelled at her and wouldn’t let her leave with me. And then I left.”
He shrugged slightly.
“Don’t remember,” he said. “So what do you want?”
“We want to know anything you can tell us about her,” Peter told him, using the only part of our original strategy that still held.
“Why?”
“We’re looking for her. If you can think of anything it might help us find her.”
“Mm. What’s it worth to you?”
I know I must have looked stunned at the question, though Peter took it in stride.
“Some,” he said imperturbably.
Mike laughed once, a hard, harsh sound.
“Don’t worry. I don’t know much so it’s not w
orth much. You probably figured that out. But I’ll tell you what I do know if you spot me fifty bucks at the comm. Call it a ‘thank you’ for my time.”
Peter looked at me before replying.
“Deal,” he said briefly.
“I’ll trust you. What’ve I got to lose, right? Send a money order for my account.”
“Fine. What can you tell us?”
“Marianne… She wasn’t like the others. Drove me up the wall. Nothing seemed to get to her, you know? I never got why she hung with us.”
“Where did you meet her?”
“She worked for the agency where I was under contract. I was a model for a while, but the whole thing was so corporate and shallow and—fucked up—I just couldn’t handle it. Blew my wad and quit. Marianne and me’d gone out a few times and stayed in touch. Then I rented the dump in Newark and got some people to move in, thinking it’d be kind of a ‘fuck you’ to the establishment.” He cracked his knuckles, making me wince. “Did some seriously fucked-up shit. It became like this mission—screw the man by screwing each other. We got into some petty shit, theft and dealing, enough to scrounge food and stay stoned. Stopped paying the rent after a while, but the old guy who owned the place said we reminded him of the sixties.” He laughed. “Peace and love and all that shit. Except I wanted to blow—shit—up.”
His large blue eyes had deep lines around them. He shook his head.
“I was an angry little shit,” he said. “Went about it the wrong way. The establishment’s going to have to go down from the inside. I get that now. Just watching it implode a little more every day. Before you know it, that one percent at the top is just going to go ‘pop’ and all their money and power will be gone.”
He sounded more resigned than impassioned. Whatever fervor had driven Mike to reject the system so sordidly and completely—inspiring him to make bombs and take hostages and whatever other appalling choices he’d made—apparently hadn’t survived his incarceration. He didn’t scare me anymore. Six years ago, this man had shaken me—his malevolence, his vicious and brutal treatment of Marianne, his filthy savagery. And now he was just a washed-up model in prison, a protest leader who’d never accomplished anything worthwhile. I almost felt sorry for him, but stopped short of that. He wasn’t a pitiful figure. Just a failed one.
“Mmhm,” Peter replied neutrally. “When did Marianne end up leaving your group?”
“Not sure. Before I got arrested. She hung with us a year or so.”
“Did she just take off one day, or…?”
Mike thought back.
“I guess so… something like that. She—no, wait. Some guy came and talked to her—this older guy. I must not have been too fucked up that day, ‘cause I remember now.”
“An older guy,” repeated Peter. “Did he say who he was?”
“Nah. Never caught a name. Or forgot it. He looked like one of those dicks from Wall Street—suit, slicked back hair, shiny shoes. Didn’t like getting them dirty on our floor. He pushed his way in and said some shit to Marianne… something about… her time was up. She looked kind of freaked—and nothing freaked this girl. I got up on him and he didn’t even flinch, just stared at her and said some more shit about making her choice and then left. Cold fucker. Ice cold. Marianne didn’t say anything—yeah, no, she just left. Didn’t take her stuff or anything, she just stood there while I yelled at her and then walked out. Never saw her again.”
Peter and I glanced at each other.
“She didn’t come back for her stuff later?”
“Nah. There wasn’t much. Some clothes and couple notebooks and shit. What we couldn’t sell we tossed.”
My stomach sank. I hadn’t really expected Mike Sorenson to give us any leads, but it was just such a final dead end. The appearance of the older man raised a lot of questions—who was he, what did he mean by “her time was up?” Assuming Mike even remembered right—but gave us nothing more to go on.
“Well, thanks,” Peter was saying.
“Told you it wasn’t much.” Mike grinned, showing nicotine-stained teeth.
“We’ll get that fifty to you.”
“Cool.”
Mike nodded to the nearest guard and stood up, while we continued to sit, as instructed. He was a few steps from the table when he turned around and came back.
“Just thought of something—doubt it means anything…”
“What’s that?” Peter asked, his tone betraying the same sense of pessimism that had settled over me.
“She sent us a postcard after she left—from some foreign place. South America, maybe. It was weird, though. It just said ‘Pegasus,’ and her name.”
“Pegasus?” I repeated.
“Crazy, right? It became like this running joke. Unicorn, Pegasus, Loch Ness Monster. She went off to find them, like those fucking stupid shows on the Discovery Channel. Anyway, that’s it.”
“Thanks,” I said this time, since Peter already had once. “We appreciate you seeing us.”
“No prob. It’s not like my social calendar’s real full, you know?” He got up and strolled back the way he’d entered without another glance at us. A guard met him at the door and opened it, and Mike had disappeared.
■ ■ ■
At a little after four, we were on the shuttle heading back to Harlem. We’d gotten back to the main exit to find that it was already almost three thirty, and had spent the remaining half hour or so stretching our legs around an unrestricted grassy area and talking about what we’d learned.
“Pegasus doesn’t mean anything to you?” Peter had asked me.
“Nothing. Marianne wasn’t into things like that,” I said. “Fantasy or mythology. At least not when we were growing up. She liked true crime and mysteries.”
“So whatever it referred to, it probably wasn’t a winged horse—unless there’s some other inside reference with the loft people that we don’t know about.”
“Wouldn’t Mike have known about it?”
“Maybe not. She could have meant it for someone else there. He didn’t remember the postcard being addressed to any one person, but I’m not sure that means a whole lot.”
“I’m kind of surprised he remembered as much as he did.”
Peter looked blank and said nothing.
“You think he was lying?” I asked, wondering why I should be surprised.
“Maybe not deliberately, but yeah, I think it’s possible he added a few details. Still, what he said about the Wall Street guy did line up with Napoletti’s story about the guy who asked about the loft for his daughter. He might have been looking for Marianne, or looking for information about her.”
“Who do you think he was?”
“I was kind of hoping you might have an idea about that. What about her father?”
That did surprise me.
“Uncle Leonard? But…” I trailed off, considering this for the first time. For some unknown reason, I’d only met my aunt and uncle twice, once when I was very young and once as a pre-teen, brief visits while they collected Marianne to spend a few weeks traveling with them. “I never saw him dressed like that,” I said slowly, trying to remember. “His hair was short, I think, kind of pepper and salt, and he had a beard. I don’t know her parents at all.”
“Who was related to who?”
“Our moms were half-sisters. They didn’t grow up together—her mom was a lot older than mine. They’ve always spent most of their time overseas.”
“Nobody said anything about a beard, but he could have shaved it off.”
“I guess her father makes as much sense as anybody, though I’d never have said he cared much about her welfare. They started leaving Marianne with my parents not long after I was born.”
“Is she close to them now?”
“I highly doubt it. Though she might still be in touch with them, I don’t know. They didn’t reach out when either of my parents died.”
“Her time was up…” Peter mused to himself. “Seems like that implies an ult
imatum of some kind.”
“She reacted like it did. I thought she left the group because she finally got fed up with—well, with all of it, but it sounds like it was this man coming that made her leave.”
“Definitely puts a different spin on the situation,” Peter agreed. “Not long after that, she tells you that she’s working for a travel agency and living in Manhattan, right?”
“Yeah. She never gave me the address and I never visited her again, but that’s what she said.”
“What agency, do you know?”
I shook my head.
“I wonder if there’s one called Pegasus.”
There were three in the greater New York area, though only one listed an address in Manhattan: Pegasus Destinations. It came up on the search as a business listing, but other than the address, had no website or other information. Another Pegasus was in Long Island, with an impressive, up-to-date website, and a third was in Brooklyn, which, according to Yelp, had closed a few years ago.
“Narrows it down,” Peter said, putting his phone back in his pocket. “Though it might be a stretch to put the two things together.”
“It’s something,” I said. “And it’s our only lead. Where else would we start looking? I mean, it could mean anything.”
“We’ve come this far, we might as well check out the Manhattan address,” Peter agreed, though I could tell he didn’t believe we’d find anything.
I didn’t believe it either. It just seemed so wasteful to have come this far and still have no clue what, or who, Marianne was protecting me from. All we knew for sure was that someone had been following us on Monday afternoon. Everything else was a tangle of speculation and unanswered questions, bringing us no closer to a resolution. We had one more day here, less than a day, and still had no clue as to what was going on. Only Pegasus, that was the single piece of information Marianne had left behind in New York, lodged in the decidedly sketchy memory of a convicted felon.
After we found nothing at the address, because of course there would be nothing to find, we’d go back to California on Thursday, empty handed and possibly tailed by person or persons unknown. It was a discouraging thought for a lot of reasons.
Spiders in a Dark Web Page 14