The Least Useful Victim Ever

[Kaleo]

How would -you- try to solve this one?

I picked up a side mission. Retrieve a stolen necklace. Easy enough. I get some info from the victim. Their address, the item stolen, what room it was stolen from, and the date and time estimate of the theft.

It's only after 30 minutes of scanning for prints that I realise that this necklace was stolen THREE in-game days ago. Now, I don't know how fast prints despawn, but I doubt they last several days. So that's a bust. A quick hustle to the surveillance room for the building proves my next fear, there is no surveillance record that far back. Not that it'd help, the only relevant camera is one floor down and barely sees the turn up the stairs. I doubt it'd have triggered for the thief going up and down the stairs.

Okay... Okay this is not great, I think to myself. But the victim believes the perp is someone they know, so alright, to the address book. They have FOURTEEN people in their address book. Add one neighbor above and three below them, and presumably fifteen or so co-workers, and that... is a lot of houses to break, enter, and scour for the necklace.

Uhhh... call history..? Nope, can't retrieve it.

How would you even go about this? It seems like the only way to find it is, essentially, by luck. Stumbling onto it in the course of other cases. It seems to me this case went cold long before I called the victim.

[Zalugar]

In my case I loaded an old save and found a fingerprint that way. Not that it mattered too much.

As a result, none of the people in the address book had it, nor their neighbors. A random coworker of the client kept it in his safe.

Like you, it was stolen before the world generated, so even loading my earliest save couldn't see CCTV since the footage never existed. And the guy who stole it had stolen it during his work shift, so even sorting by work hours for the time estimate for the crime didn't help.

It's just a lot of legwork and checking literally everyone they know.