I frown, confusion creeping into my voice. “What do you mean? He was in the police force. He should be there.”
“That’s what’s strange,” she says, her tone low and frustrated. “Nick isn’t in any of the police records. Not in the internal files, no disciplinary reports, no incidents. It’s like he never existed in the system. Even though we know he was a part of it, there’s not a single trace of him.”
Sawyer’s brow furrows. “You’re saying a former cop, a guy who worked within the system, has no record at all? Not even a mention in the system?”
“Exactly,” Ada replies, her eyes narrowing.
I sit back in my seat, feeling the weight of her words settle. ‘‘That doesn’t make sense. Who the hell is he? We need to dig deeper, maybe Dominik can help.’’
I pause, ‘‘If he still remembers me.’’
Ada bites her lip, her expression turning thoughtful as she glances at me. “Actually, I did find something else interesting… It’s not about Nick, but it is about this Lorenzo guy—the one from the file you got.”
I turn to her, intrigued. “What about him?”
“Antonio Lorenzo. That name came up in one of the older, archived registries, buried in one of Karpov’s encrypted drives. Not something that was easy to find, which tells me someone wanted it kept that way.”
She pulls her phone from her bag and slides it across the table to me. The screen glows softly with a scanned page—grainy, aged, handwritten annotations running along the margins. Ada taps a line in the middle.
“That’s Lorenzo. But look one name underneath him.”
I squint, leaning in. My stomach dips.
“N. K.,” I read aloud, the letters catching like thorns in my throat. “That’s Nick, isn’t it? Nick King?”
Ada exhales slowly. “I think so. It fits, the timeline, the placement, the context.’’
‘‘The time stamp lines up with the years Nick was supposedly in the police force.’’
I stare at the screen, heart thudding. Then something else catches my eye; a name above Lorenzo’s. Faint. Smudged. The ink darker in places, as though someone had tried to scratch it out.
“Wait,” I murmur, tapping the spot. “What about this one? The name right above his. It starts with ‘Sal’but the rest is… gone. Scribbled through.”
Ada leans in, frowning. “Yeah. I noticed that too. The ink’s been deliberately dragged across the page, like someone didn’t just want it hidden, they wanted it erased.”
“Sal… what?” I ask, more to myself than anyone.
Ada shakes her head, frustration flickering across her face. “I don’t know. There’s too little to go on. No surname, no initials, no location tags—just ‘Sal’ and then a mess. It could lead back to anyone. Or maybe it’s a code name.’’
I run my hands across my face in frustration, the mess only seems to grow bigger.
‘‘I also found this,’’ Ada adds sharing my frustration.
She flicks to another screen, overlaying two handwritten notes; one from the registry, one from a document in Karpov’s files.
“Same handwriting of both handwritten annotations,” she says. “I ran it through the scanner twice to be sure.”
Sawyer lets out a low whistle. “You’re saying Nick had ties to Antonio Lorenzo?’’
Ada doesn’t answer right away. Her eyes stay fixed on the screen, lips pressed into a thin line. The silence stretches.
Then finally, she speaks, quietly, like the words weigh more than she wants to admit.
“We can’t find anything about Nick. Nothing concrete. No service record, no digital footprint, not even a trace in police databases. It’s like he doesn’t exist. And now, suddenly, this—a name, or maybe just initials—connected to that man…”
Another long pause follows. The kind that knots the air around us.
She glances at me, her voice barely above a whisper.
