The Finebaum Files

From the Chronicles of Corbin, Esoteric Private Eye by Andy Nowicki

North Fox Island. Image via Destination: North Fox Island, Michigan — General Aviation News

The following passage is from my newly-published story, “The Finebaum Files,” which continues the saga of The Chronicles of Corbin, Esoteric Private Eye.

“The Finebaum Files” is now available to purchase on Kindle for just $2.50 (or the equivalent price outside of the U.S.)

The release of the Finebaum files has shocked the nation, proving beyond a doubt that much of the world’s political, financial, and academic elites are implicated in the vilest of crimes, including child sex trafficking.

Now a gang of vigilantes are on the loose, dispensing rough justice to degenerate celebrities revealed to be on the “Finebaum list.”

Corbin, an “esoteric” private investigator who operates in a shadow realm somewhere between the real and the liminal, has been hired by a mysterious government agency to infiltrate this vigilante cell.

But there is more to this story than meets the eye. Could Corbin be walking into a trap?

A story of mystery, manipulation, and mind-control, “The Finebaum Files” is part 2 in the “Chronicles of Corbin” series, the follow-up to Part 1, “The Incel Massacre,” written by Andy Nowicki.

Below, for your exclusive delectation, is an excerpt from The Finebaum Files: From the Chronicles of Corbin, Esoteric Private Eye:

“Call me Corbin”

At long last, my companion spoke, casually informing me that he represented a private firm who often contracted with “other entities, including the various branches of our intelligences services.” At present, there was a particularly thorny matter which needed addressing.

“These Finebaum files, they’ve been something else, haven’t they?” he asked.

He was, of course, referring to the recent declassifying of millions of documents, mostly emails, related to a notorious character named Isaac Finebaum, a financier with extensive establishment connections and a predilection for young girls. His extensive child trafficking network, and the fact that he hobnobbed with numerous high-profile figures in politics, academia, and the entertainment industry—and even foreign royalty!—while funding nefarious projects, some of which seemed to involve impregnating underage lasses for purposes related to eugenics, along with other horrors.

“Yeah, they’re something else all right,” I answered my companion’s rhetorical question. “He had some ties with intelligence too, didn’t he?”

Hughes grinned enigmatically at this rhetorical sally of mine. I used the past tense (“had”), because Finebaum had, upon federal arrest, apparently killed himself in his prison cell, though many felt sure he was murdered to keep quiet, and others strongly suspected that he hadn’t died at all, but had been spirited away, and a body double had been left in his place.

In any case, whether alive or dead, the Finebaum who had previously existed as a high-profile trafficker of children, collector of celebrity friends, and funder of dubious projects, no longer existed, at least not in any conspicuous sense.

“I tell you, those files should never have been released,” Hughes declared. “There are some things it’s best to keep secret from the public. Trust me, I know.”

“I bet you do,” I replied evenly.

“I’ll be the first to admit that there’s plenty of corruption and malfeasance going on. But whoever made the decision to release those files to the public, even with all of the redactions, must have been out of his mind.”

He made this pronouncement with greater conviction than I had ever heard from him previously. For all of that, I felt a little amused by his use of a term like “malfeasance,” with its patently benign connotations, given the context. But I remained self-possessed, and asked, “And where do you envision me playing a role in all of this?”

It seemed apropos, at that juncture, to ask the question bluntly. He leaned close, and told me that he was about to appraise me of things that I was not to repeat. Were I ever to repeat what he told me to others, he said, he could not guarantee my safety.

I was nonplussed that he was apparently about to share such secrets in a public setting. Of course, the café was now sparsely attended, the lunch crowd had mostly dispersed; still, there was the staff, and a few customers still seated in scattered tables and booths across the room.

“People overhearing me isn’t of particular concern,” he said—again, as earlier, seemingly reading my thoughts, which put me once more on guard (had that been his intention all along?). “The worst they could do is pass along some titillating story, one which would only have the effect of raising our profile and giving us even greater clout in the minds of the masses.”

I nodded, unsure what to think, and he continued.

“As I’m sure you know by now, we—that is to say, men of my ilk-- have a stranglehold over what gets released as ‘news.’ It must have been one of ours who saw to it that the Finebaum tranche was unleashed upon the public, although I guess one at my paygrade is kept in the dark about such a harebrained strategy, but I suppose that isn’t for me to say… In any case (and now he fixed his eyes upon mine), there have been three murders that the world knows nothing about.”

He listed the names of three A-list celebrities, one a movie star, the other two famous pop singers.

“All dead. More precisely, murdered. Execution style,”

The movie star, a woman in her thirties, was implicated in the files for having acted as a recruiter for what had been jocularly called “Finebaum’s fillies,” the underage girls whom Finebaum procured and pimped out to his rich and famous friends. The two men had been exposed as “clients,” and emails had been released which suggested they each had a proclivity to severely abuse their underage sexual partners.

There had been a great hue and cry about the general inaction of the authorities in response to the activities alluded to in numerous files, and a general assumption that the reason for the seeming indifference of federal law-enforcement bodies was that all of the alleged murderers, rapists, pedophiles, and alleged engagers in fearful rituals including the consumption of babies, were simply too rich and powerful to have to face actual justice.

“Of course, certain venues reported that these killings had been carried out, and it became necessary for us to remove these stories from social media and flag them as ‘misinformation.’ We nipped it in the bud, and were able to portray any lingering rumors as scurrilously erroneous. We even used AI to portray all three of the murdered holding press conferences, in which they assure us that they aren’t dead, and that anyone claiming otherwise is just pushing a baseless rumor.”

“Can’t let the truth get out, eh?” I asked, a bit archly. “Even using AI to help perpetrate your lie. That’s a bit extreme, even for you lot.”

If Hughes seemed bothered by my scathing remarks, he didn’t show it.

“Touche, you’ve got our number all right,” he said, almost embarrassedly. “I don’t ask you to agree with us, but merely to see things from our point of view… If this gets out, there will be more copycats, and our nation could well descend into anarchy, full of self-appointed vigilantes taking the law into their own hands. Such an outcome is in no one’s best interest, I assure you.”

I told him frankly that I didn’t care in the least if some degenerates got plugged, though of course (I added this latter with a sardonic smile), I would never do violence to a fellow human being myself.

“But maybe to a lizard being masquerading as a person,” I added insouciantly.

Again, my companion didn’t miss a beat.

“I’d figured you’ll feel that way, Corbin, based on everything I have heard about you. And that’s why we think you’ll make an ideal infiltrator of these vigilante groups, since you don’t even have to put on an act!”

I sat quietly, and pondered just what this overdressed dandy was proposing. When I told him that undercover work was not my forte, he slammed his fist on the table and smiled widely.

“That’s just it, you’re not truly going undercover! You’d be going as yourself!”

I was genuinely taken aback, but before I was able to respond, he was continuing with the pitch. “______ Corbin (here he was brazen enough to use my actual first name), a man with many dangerous clients concerned with maintaining discretion, yet also a man of conscience, in spite of the mercenary nature of his profession…. I mean, it’s so you! “

Hughes grinned in a manner that deeply disagreed with me. There was something in his bearing that seemed to presume a familiarity with my being, as if the two of us were old buddies. Was he deliberately attempting to provoke me, or was this just his awkward way of attempting to establish rapport? Was he, that is, incompetent or supremely competent?

Read Andy Nowicki’s The Finebaum Files: From the Chronicles of Corbin, Esoteric Private Eye, now available on Amazon Kindle

Read part 1 of the Corbin chronicles, “The Incel Massacre,” also available on Kindle.