While the target investigator Nora Weiss celebrates the success of a successful operation with Jan Geissler, they are visited by the Bavarian local politician Monika Landau. She is desperately looking for her husband Patrick. They recently started their holiday trip here on the Baltic Sea because her husband is a passionate sailor. But now he has not returned from a sailing trip. Jan Geissler organizes a colleague to help, but Nora gets a bad feeling. This is confirmed the next day when the sailor's body is washed up on the beach. Together with her colleague from the Lübeck murder commission, Simon Brandt, Nora begins to examine the life and surroundings of the dead man in order to find a "handle" an indication of what could have happened to him.
A trail finally leads the investigators to Güstrow in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania. Maik Wosniak seems to be hiding something there, which is why he sets his dog on the investigators and is able to escape from them in a breakneck chase. But with him Nora has found a "handle". In old Stasi files, she finds out that the fugitive was in East German prison while Patrick fled East Germany on a sailing boat. Parallel to the investigation, Nora's father, Pastor Rainer Weiss, is to receive an award from a human rights association for his work as an escape helper in the GDR era. A terrible suspicion smolders in Nora: Did her father play a completely different role as an escape helper than he claims?