can anyone help with monitoring a laptop remotely

Hi.
Long story short, I'm involved with some political shinanigans with someone and I sometimes have access to their laptop and I want to try and catch them doing something illegal. I thought about one of those commercial remote keyloggers but I don't know maybe I want to try something else, maybe something less bulky because that might slow the laptop down and cause suspicion. I thought about windows remote desktop, anyone here have advice on that? Is there a way to secretly set that up without the virtual network showing up in the network places? Lol I'm probably i the wrong place, I probably need to talk to some hackers. :-D