The Sinner's Claim

*He's not missing.*

Bo Jenkins has three empty whiskey glasses lined up in front of him like soldiers, and he wants Roz Mallory to understand the distinction. *Missing means someone's looking. Nobody's looking for Leo.*

*I'm looking,* she says.

Sixteen days ago her brother's last text came through - *Staying with a friend. Don't worry* - and after that his phone went straight to voicemail. Roz is a state fish and wildlife officer. She chases poachers. Bo puts it plainly: the people who took her brother are not worried about her little state badge.

What he does give her is a name. Dante Conti, who runs boat charters out of Port Corbin and pays day labour in cash with no questions. Leo went out with that crew three times. The fourth time, he didn't come back.

And a place. The old-timers call it Dead Man's Cove. The people who use it call it the Door. *Because once you go through, you don't come back.*

Then a man in a flat cap walks out of the bar without looking at anyone - pressed jeans, expensive work boots that have never seen a real job site - and what is left of the colour drains out of Bo's face.

Dante Conti is thirty-four. He keeps a yard of half-stripped hulls behind a chain-link fence and spends midnights sanding his dead brother's boat, because it is all he has left of him. Matteo Conti washed up on the rocks south of town two years ago. The official report said accidental drowning. The old men over coffee at the diner said he had been found with his hands tied.

Somebody has left a note where Dante will find it: *Stay out of the straits, Conti.*

And somebody leaves a note for Roz, in handwriting she knows: *Roz-they know about Sara. Don't trust the Contis.*

Sara is their sister. She disappeared five years ago, trafficked through a pipeline Roz was never able to trace, on the case that nearly destroyed her. Which means her brother knew, and was trying to protect her, and went out on that fourth charter anyway.

A closed-door romantic suspense of fog, salt water and a working harbour, about a woman who has already lost one sibling to the dark, and a man who carries his family's name like a sentence.