The first rule of committing a felony is to not use your own equipment. That seemed like a good, common-sense place to start. I stared at my laptop, the one containing Jessica's ghostly testimony, and a new, practical fear dawned on me. My digital footprint was all over that machine. If I used it to try and hack into a corporate director's life, the trail would lead directly back to me. The authorities might not believe my ghost story, but they would absolutely believe the server logs showing my IP address trying to brute-force a password.
I needed a burner. Something clean, untraceable, and disposable.
This led me to my next problem: I was broke. The financial crater left by my date with Mona Po had left me in a state of fiscal destitution. My bank account was a wasteland. I had maybe forty dollars in cash to my name. It wasn't enough to buy a new laptop, not even a cheap one from a pawn shop.
Panic, my new constant companion, began to prickle at the back of my neck. Every problem I encountered was blocked by another, more mundane one. To be a paranormal investigator, it turned out, you first needed a healthy line of credit.
I spent the next hour pacing my apartment, the cold spot in my chest pulsing with what I could only interpret as Jessica's impatience. She had given me a lead, and I was stalling.
"I'm trying!" I snapped at the empty air, my voice frayed. "This stuff costs money, and I don't have any!"
The cold in my chest lessened slightly, replaced by a different sensation. It wasn't a spike of "yes" or a fade of "no." It was a strange, gentle pull, a sense of direction. It was guiding my attention towards the coat closet near my front door.
Confused, I walked over and opened it. Inside was a mess of old jackets, a broken umbrella, and a single, forgotten backpack from my college days. The pull was directed at the backpack. I unzipped it. And there, at the bottom, tucked into a textbook I hadn't opened in three years, was a crisp, one-hundred-dollar bill.
My emergency fund. I had forgotten all about it. It was my last line of defense against true financial catastrophe, and I had hidden it so well I'd forgotten it existed.
"Thank you," I breathed, feeling a wave of relief so profound it almost made me dizzy. Maybe having a ghostly parasite wasn't all bad.
With my newfound capital, I set out on my mission. I walked ten blocks in the opposite direction of my apartment to a sprawling, twenty-four-hour electronics store. I paid in cash for the cheapest, most anonymous Chromebook they sold. From there, I went to a coffee shop another five blocks away, one I had never been to before. I connected to their public Wi-Fi—a cesspool of compromised data, but perfect for my purposes—and set up a new, anonymous email address and a VPN subscription, paying with a prepaid gift card I bought with the last of my emergency cash.
I was now a digital ghost. I had a clean machine, a masked IP address, and an untraceable email. It was time to go grave-robbing.
Back in the sterile, anonymous environment of a different coffee shop across town, I opened my new, pristine laptop and began my hunt for Harold Finch. A simple search brought up his professional profile on Innovate Solutions' corporate website. It was a typical executive bio, full of meaningless buzzwords like "synergy," "paradigm," and "disruptive innovation." There was a photo of him, the same arrogant, smiling man I had seen in the office. He looked like the human embodiment of a spam email.
His bio didn't give me his birthday, but it was a start. Next, I moved on to the more public arenas of the internet: social media. I found his Facebook, his Instagram, his LinkedIn. They were all locked down tight, with privacy settings cranked to the maximum. A dead end. The man was a corporate drone, but he wasn't a complete idiot.
But Jessica had said he was arrogant and lazy. He reused passwords. What if he reused more than that? I went back to his professional bio and scoured it for personal details. It mentioned he was an alumnus of Northwestern University. It mentioned he was a fan of the Chicago Cubs. Small details, but they were something.
The password hint was "Duke" and his birthday in August. I needed the year and the day. The hunt for his date of birth became my singular obsession. I spent hours trawling through public records databases, alumni newsletters, and archived news articles. It was mind-numbing work, a needle-in-a-haystack search through the digital refuse of a man's life.
Finally, after what felt like an eternity, I found it. A small, local newspaper article from five years ago about a charity fun-run sponsored by Innovate Solutions. The article included a list of notable participants. There he was: "Harold Finch, 42." The article was dated May. A little bit of math told me his birth year. Now I just needed the day.
I went back to his locked-down Facebook profile. I couldn't see his posts, but the public "transparency" section of his page told me the month and year he had joined. August 2008. I started scrolling backwards through his timeline, all the way back to the beginning. His first handful of posts were public. And there it was. On August 14th, 2008, a flurry of "Happy Birthday!" posts from his first few friends on the platform.
August 14th.
My heart began to beat faster. I had all the pieces.
Dog's Name: Duke
Birth Month: August (08)
Birth Day: 14
Birth Year: I calculated it from the article.
Now came the variations. Duke0814? Duke19XX? duke0814? I opened a new tab and navigated to Gmail's login page. I typed in what I guessed was his personal email address, harold.finch@gmail.com, based on common email formats. Then I moved to the password field.
My hands hovered over the keyboard. This was the moment of truth. Crossing this line was a federal crime. I was no longer just a weird guy with a ghost problem; I was actively attempting to commit a serious offense. The countdown on my black phone seemed to tick louder in my mind. Twenty-eight days left. I had no other choice.
I took a deep breath and started trying the combinations.
Duke0814 - Password incorrect.
duke0814 - Password incorrect.
Duke19XX (with his birth year) - Password incorrect.
Duke0814XX - Password incorrect.
My hope began to wane. Maybe Jessica's information was wrong. Maybe he had finally changed his password after she died, just in case. I tried one last, stupidly simple combination. The kind of password a lazy, arrogant man who thinks no one would ever dare challenge him would create.
I typed: Duke
The page began to load. And then, I was in.
I was staring at the personal, private inbox of Harold Finch.
The sheer, breathtaking stupidity of it almost made me laugh out loud in the crowded coffee shop. His password was just his dog's name. A four-letter word. It was the digital equivalent of leaving your front door wide open with a sign that says "Please Rob Me." Jessica was right. He wasn't smart. He was just arrogant.
My eyes scanned the inbox, a decade's worth of personal correspondence, bank statements, vacation confirmations, and junk mail. I wasn't looking for anything specific. I was just looking for a thread, a clue, something out of place. I used the search bar. I searched for "Jessica Miller." I searched for "brakes." I searched for "car." Nothing. He wasn't foolish enough to put anything incriminating in an email.
Then I saw the tab on the side of the Google interface. The one for Google Drive.
My blood ran cold. I SAVED THE EMAILS TO A DRIVE. Jessica's words.
With a trembling click, I opened his personal cloud storage. It was a disorganized mess of photos, documents, and spreadsheets. There were pictures of his dog, Duke, a handsome Golden Retriever. There were vacation photos from Cabo. There were spreadsheets detailing his stock portfolio.
And then I saw it. A single folder, created seven months ago, just a few weeks before Jessica's death. It was cryptically named "Project Nightingale."
I opened the folder.
Inside was a series of screenshots. They were emails, copied and saved as image files. The emails were a chain between Harold Finch and several other Innovate Solutions executives. They detailed, in cold, corporate language, his plan to take credit for a project he hadn't created. He referred to the original creator only as "my assistant," belittling her work while simultaneously claiming it as his own breakthrough.
But the final screenshot was the one that made my world stop. It wasn't an email. It was a search history log from his work computer.
"how to disable anti-lock brakes on a 2018 Honda Civic"
"local car mechanic shops no questions asked"
"can brake failure be traced"
"how long does it take for a body to be found"
I had it. I had the proof. It wasn't just a confession. It was a step-by-step digital diary of a premeditated murder.
I saved the entire folder to a secure, encrypted USB drive I had brought with me. As I clicked "download," a new notification pinged on the black phone in my pocket. I pulled it out. It was from Eternity, Inc.
[Probationary Objective Update: You have successfully acquired incriminating evidence against a Tier-3 Sinner (Harold Finch). You are one step closer to resolving the target spirit's regret.] [Merit Point Bonus Awarded: +5 MP]
I looked at my Merit Point balance. It was no longer zero. I had five points. Just enough to buy the Level 1 Ectoplasmic Empathy skill.
I had the proof. I had the means to communicate better with my ghostly companion. For the first time, I felt a flicker of something that wasn't pure, abject terror.
It was hope. And it was terrifying.