Present day. Jack pays a clerk at some YMCA-type place eight bucks to use the locker room. It's not a hot shower he's interested in, but a locker he opens with the key he found in his jacket. Inside are new clothes and a gun, which the clerk sees when he comes to bring Jack a towel. Jack throws him against a locker.

Madsen heads over to a place unimaginatively called Ray's Bar. A seventy-something man greets her, "Hey, Becky!" She calls him "Uncle Ray" and asks him for help on her case. Ray's not surprised to learn that somebody murdered Tiller, who was the Deputy Warden when he worked there as a guard. Soto joins Madsen at the bar. He immediately recognizes Ray. "It's an honor, sir!" He says he studied Ray and even named a character in his comic after him. Yet he never interviewed him for one of his four books on Alcatraz? Info dump: Ray isn't Madsen's biological uncle, but raised her after her parents died. She says her grandfather, Tommy Madsen, was a guard at Alcatraz with Ray. "You write about him?" Madsen asks. "Sure," Soto says, making with the shifty eyes. Soto's uncovered a death certificate for Jack Sylvane from 1976. Uncle Ray tells them to stay out of it because it's a federal case, blah blah blah, but Soto quickly talks her into sticking with it. He tells her that the last time he was on the Rock, he found a room full of all kinds of files and things he wasn't supposed to see. You'd think a prison, even a decrepit old one, would be better at locking that crap away, but apparently not. They agree to meet up again.

As they make their way onto the island the next morning, Soto pulls Madsen away from the stream of tourists. They head into an area that's been blocked off by a very low-hanging chain which they just step right over. Soto tells her they're going to the barracks, where the guards lived with their families. It's just as depressing a place as one would imagine. They get to Soto's mystery room and find it blocked off by a gate. Madsen gets to work picking the lock. "Aren't you kind of young to be a detective?" Soto asks. "Yeah, I get that a lot," she says. "Bet you have a pretty cool origin story," he says. I bet not. She explains: "I was raised by a cop. He'd bring his cases home. I'd read them before bed, put Post-its where I thought he should look. I actually helped him solve a few cases." Ooh, don't make me hate you halfway through the first episode, lady. She gets through the lock (she studied locksmithing in kindergarten) and they find a room stacked floor to ceiling with file boxes and inmates' personal effects. Suddenly, the lights click off. A smoke bomb rolls towards them. One sniff and our intrepid trespassers drop to the floor, unconscious.