The obsfucation has lost data.

You said NCI2 is used, but the key column (Col4) is not filtered on in the query and hence SQL can't seek on it. However the forced plan shows a seek, so one of them is wrong

I'm not in the mood for trying to figure out what got lost where, so an optimal, covering index for that query (as specified in your last post) will be:

Key columns - (Col1, Col14, Col2) -- in that order, or maybe (Col14, Col1, Col2)

Include (Column3, Column4, Column5, Column6,

Column7, Column8, Column9, Column10,

Column11, Column12, Column13, Column15)

Optimiser should use one of those automatically