Island sounds. Normal sounds.
Except nothing was normal.
While we sat there, my brain spun.
Priya leaving the bar. The ferry terminal. The last ping.
And then the other pieces I’d been staring at all day: women who vanished in liminal places. Boats coming and going. Seasonal clustering. The kind of infrastructure you didn’t notice until you knew to look for it.
This—one fisherman and a beat-up old building—didn’t erase that.
But it made room for an alternative: the messy human variables that threaded through bigger crimes and made them possible.
A man who knew her.
A man who’d watched her play pool and laugh and not care that he wanted her attention.
A man who couldn’t stand the idea that she belonged to herself.
I hated that my mind went there. I hated that it made a kind of horrible sense.
The door scraped open, and my body locked.
Rios’s hand lifted slightly, a silent command for stillness, though I’d already frozen. I couldn’t have moved if I’d wanted to.
The man stepped out alone. He locked the door, glanced around, and headed back toward the marina and the bar without turning on any exterior lights. He moved like he expected no one to be here—which meant he either felt safe…
…or he felt entitled.
I waited for Rios to signal, to move, to do something.
He watched the retreating figure until it became nothing but a smear of darkness against the night. Then he waited—not just a few seconds, but several long, careful minutes—before finally rising from his crouch. His movements were deliberate, practiced, the kind of patience born from military training and years of knowing that rushing could get you killed.
I followed, my knees stiff and protesting after being folded beneath me for so long. My sneakers sank slightly into the damp sand with each step. The closer we got to the building, the stronger the odor became—and it wasn’t the clean, sharp scent of fresh fish or the pleasant tang of salt brine that you smelled at the docks in the morning. This was something older, more layered. Ancient salt and rot that had soaked deep into wood and metal over years, maybe decades. The scent of a place that hadn’t been properly scrubbed or maintained in a long time, not because it was forgotten, but because no one cared enough to bother anymore. Because it served its purpose as it was.
The door was secured with a thick padlock hanging from a heavy-duty hasp that had been bolted into the weathered boards. The lock itself looked relatively new, the metal still bright enough to catch what little moonlight filtered through the clouds. The rest of the building did not.
Rios crouched, examining the hardware for a moment before he pulled something from his pocket. One of those multi-tool things men carried with seventy-five uses. He flipped out one of the larger blades and went to work on the wood around the hasp—because old storm damage meant weak points, and weak points meant leverage. He worked carefully, controlled, until the board gave with a muffled crack that sounded horrifically loud in the quiet night.
Rios caught the door before it could swing wide and bang against the interior wall. He eased it open just enough for us to slip through sideways, one at a time, bodies pressed close to minimize the gap.
The smell hit like a fist.
I clamped my mouth shut hard enough that my jaw ached as I fought the gag reflex. Heat inside the building sat trapped and wet, thick with brine and something sourly organic that I couldn’t quite identify and didn’t want to. I had the distinct sense that fish had rotted here over the course of years, their decay seeping into every porous surface. Although one hot summer would be enough to bake the odor in forever.
Rios flicked on his phone flashlight. I did the same, beams slicing through the darkness to paint everything in harsh, jumping shadows.
The interior didn’t offer any additional clues to what this place might have been in its former life. A couple of badly scarred work tables had been shoved carelessly to one side, their surfaces water-stained and warped. I spotted a busted commercial ice machine with a stained tarp draped over it like a shroud, stacks of plastic storage totes in various states of deterioration, coils of rope in different thicknesses, and fishing nets hanging limp and tangled from rusted wall hooks like tired ghosts of better days. A large chest freezer sat unplugged in the far corner, its lid cracked open just enough to make my skin crawl with awful possibilities—at least until I angled my light inside and saw that it was blessedly empty except for some dried brown stains I chose not to examine too closely.
The building turned out to be significantly bigger than it had looked from outside, with an odd, maze-like collection of rooms that bled one into another without clear purpose or organization. Each space held another chaotic hodgepodge of abandoned equipment and maritime detritus. This was exactly the kind of place someone could stash a person if they wanted to. Or hide a body. Because absolutely no one came here unless they had a very specific reason to.
I moved deeper into the labyrinth, my light sweeping methodically behind stacks of totes, around the hanging nets that brushed against my shoulder and made me flinch, past a precarious stack of broken plastic chairs that looked ready to topple. My own breath sounded unreasonably loud in my ears, almost drowning out the soft shuffle of Rios’s footsteps behind me.
I found myself unconsciously counting potential hiding spaces the same way I’d learned to count and catalog evidence: corner, corner, behind, under, gap between?—
A sound cut through the silence.
Not a voice. Not words. Just a small, choked whimper that was somehow more human and more desperate than any scream could have been.
