Thanks everyone for the comments and feedback. I am glad everyone is liking the story so far. I will be honest I am running into some delays in getting the next parts out as I want this to be good and not forced. I plan on pushing through to a solid end to the story, but it may take a while. I've had a couple of folks ask that this doesn't end like Contractual Obligation or Wanna Bet. I am planning on going back to Wanna Bet and finish it (writers block hit me hard on that one), but the thing is Contractual Obligation was ended. The final chapter was supposed to be it, but lots of folks seem to think its still not done. Sorry to disappoint but it is done and I am not going to try anymore. The reason is that while lots of people really liked it, I had a LOT of grief over it, the most from any other story I have ever written and the absolute nastiest. It ruined the story for me and honestly, it's now one of my least favorite stories. I just wanted to let everyone know that is the situation on that particular story as I still get asked about it a lot.
But enough of that, here's the story you have been waiting for.
Blow Your Mind, PART VIII
FOUR MONTHS LATER
Brandi smiled as she watched the lawyer through a remote camera. "Nice body. He looks good in that suit." She made a couple of notes and then looked at another camera. Another person, a very pretty blonde police detective in a business suit strode forward down the street. Brandi looked back and forth between the cameras and snickered.
"Heading for your "Lunch Meeting" are we my dirty little piggy and lawyer? Naughty naughty."
Brandi switched over to another camera and continued to watch the two as they entered two separate expensive hotels went upstairs. The man entered a room and shortly thereafter the woman entered another room. Brandi sighed as she waited.
"Too bad these two are just paranoid enough to have the rooms swept prior to the meeting for bugs. But I should be happy that their hacker isn't as good as Mr. Case's is. Ah ha, here she comes now."
Another woman swayed down the hallway of the woman's hotel. She had long golden blonde hair, was wearing sunglasses and a full-length raincoat and a set of very nice six-inch heels. She carried a large purse that was almost an overnight bag in size and she knocked on the woman's door. After a moment she was let in and Brandi checked her clock.
The guy and the woman were both top dogs in their professions. The guy was one of the hottest DA's in the Chicago system and noted for some really high profile take downs of supposedly "connected" political figures in the Chicago machine. The woman was the youngest Police Captain in the city's history and had some very notable busts of her own, including some major gang leaders and crooked cops. They had officially cooperated a couple of times on some big cases but were never ever seen together except when their jobs crossed paths.
Mr. Case had been hired by a client who was running into trouble with an unknown factor. Aside from the difficulty of just doing business in Chicago and its corrupt City Government, he had started running into all kinds of legal and illegal problems. Unions always after him, blackmail attempts on some of his key employees, a kidnapping, problems with permits, investigations by the city's DA for violating work laws, arson, the list went on and on.
He had initially tried to do the usual and simply find out the source of the trouble and pay it off, but that was the weird thing.
He couldn't.
The attacks all seemed to be coordinated to make him NOT want to do business in Chicago, but there was no "boss" that he could find behind it. Just pressure to not start up in Chicago. Which made no sense at all as none of his other out of city business elements had any issues at all. Just Chicago.
So after trying several legal methods (including the FBI), he had contacted Mr. Case and asked him to find out what the hell was going on and why.
Mr. Case had done some initial groundwork prior to calling in Brandi. What he had found indicated that what was being done appeared to be a joint venture of some kind, organized crime and crooked politicians and cops, unions and so on. He had let Brandi know what he had and Brandi had arrived under a false ID and had gone to work.
It had been some serious old-school stuff. She had staked out, wire-tapped, tailed, bribed, asked around and done a lot of old-fashioned leg work, switching out her identities with her new skill several times using hired escorts or one-night stands to convert over into other personas. The people she was after were really serious about countering any attempts to be spied on.
She had been able to dodge the counter-surveillance using her body switching technique and had foiled a couple of attempts to track her down after she had started with the oldest method in the book which had been asking around. You could find out a lot by just asking some simple questions and even though she was very careful she noticed that she was soon picking up tails or having other questions being asked about her to include sweeps being made in hotels. She could ditch the tails and she was paying cash and moving around to different hotels every few days, but she soon found out that a lot of people were after her, or at least the persons she had been.
She had walked past a grab team once while leaving a hotel just after changing over. She had been tailed all day by someone who was very good, but she thought she had lost him. Turns out she had not and she left just as they entered. Her left behind bug had shown several men showing Chicago PD badges arresting the mind-blasted escort she had just used to change her profile with. Brandi had noted the car they used (traced back as an unmarked police car) and had discovered that the escort had simply "disappeared", no arrest record, no bail, no lawyer called (she did have one on retainer that Brandi discovered), and after a few days, her profile on the escort site were removed.
While that made her nervous as hell, it also gave her the clue she needed. She was able to tail one of the cops who had made the "arrest" and discovered that he was seeing a stripper once a week after work. Cute Kory.
That was suspicious because Kory was way too expensive for a regular detective to afford once a week, and she was way to highly connected for him to be blackmailing. Brandi had become curious when he went to the club she worked at and she saw how he was able to get in. He stood out like a sore thumb in his relatively cheap suit and his obviously lower-class attitude compared to the business sharks that normally went there. Brandi had assumed Lucinda's body and had gone in for a job as a waitress. She had landed one easily of course and had staked the place out from the inside for several days until the guy came back and she saw who he hooked up with.
Thanks to her heightened alertness and senses Brandi easily kept some tabs on Kory and had determined that Kory was seeing a lot of folks who didn't seem her type. After 10pm she was usually booked solid with high rollers and rich guys, some local and some from out of town. She and a couple of the other really hot strippers usually had one or two nights they were hired out for a big party or a really rich whale wanting some very personal service. But from about 7 to 10 pm, Kory would work the stage and she always seemed to have some folks who didn't quite fit the bill get her attention and time. Brandi would see their faces and then google the hell out of them the next day as they always paid cash and made sure to not ever flash an ID that she could see. Kory always saw them for a dance or two in a private booth, never out in the open, never where she could lip read or overhear.