Adrien, she explained, had once investigated Chief Thorne directly, and shortly after his death, every record connected to that investigation had vanished from the system without explanation. Coulson opened the database and searched, finding exactly nothing where a name should have been. Nolan tried the backup servers instead, digging through older, less carefully maintained storage. After several tense minutes, a single file surfaced, buried under a mislabeled folder that no one had thought to check.
Inside it was a video timestamped years earlier. The recording of a man who looked tired in a way that had nothing to do with sleep. "If you're watching this," the man on the screen said, his voice steady despite everything, "it means I'm no longer around to say it myself." The video ended abruptly, cutting to black before finishing whatever sentence had been coming next.
In that silence, one detail lingered in everyone's mind far longer than the recording itself. Adrien had mentioned a name just before the cut, a name none of them, including Zariah, had ever encountered before. The unsettling part was where it seemed to point, not outward toward some stranger connected to the case from a distance, but inward toward someone standing right there among them on that darkening road.
Every eye on that stretch of road turned toward the four officers standing near the horse because the man in the recording had made it clear in his final words before the screen went black that Chief Thorne was not actually the person he suspected most. "There is someone else," Adrien had said. Though his face had shown no fear, the words themselves carried a weight that settled over the group like a change in the air.
The name itself had been deliberately obscured in the recording, but a short alphanumeric code remained visible just beneath it, and Nolan recognized the format immediately as an internal account identifier used only by active department personnel. When he traced it, the code resolved to a name that made the entire group go quiet. It belonged to Deputy Merrick Sloan.
Merrick's reaction was instant and sharp. "That's not me," he said, his voice rising for the first time since the stop had begun. Coulson turned toward him with a look that mixed suspicion with genuine reluctance, unwilling to believe it, but unable to dismiss it outright. Merrick explained quickly and with evident frustration that his account credentials had been compromised months earlier, a breach he had reported at the time and assumed had been resolved.
Zariah did not rush to any conclusion, choosing instead to ask him calmly for his phone. He hesitated before handing it over, and the tension in that hesitation stretched long enough that Coulson finally said his name aloud, almost gently. "Merrick," he said. "You know me," Merrick answered. "Then give her the phone," Coulson said. After a moment longer, he did.