Page 164 of Chameleon Killer

By four, my phone buzzed. I hit the earbud to answer it while I kept climbing. “Talk.”

Ruiz. “Still nothing on thermal.”

“Define nothing.”

“No reliable signatures.”

“She's a hundred-and-twenty-pound woman in an empty office building. Find her.”

Carter's head turned. I kept climbing.

“We're getting heat,” Ruiz said. “I'm saying I can't verify what the heat represents.”

I stopped on the landing between four and five. “What does that mean?”

“Multiple signatures. Some stationary. Some moving.”

“How many?”

“They keep changing.”

I tilted my head back to watch Foster’s men as they exited on five to sweep the floor.

“People don't change.”

“No, sir.”

Carter had heard enough to understand. “Decoys,” he said.

I glanced at him.

“Heat sources,” he continued. “Portable heaters. Computers. Anything warm enough to register.”

“Possible,” Ruiz said through the phone.

Possible.

Irritating was more like it.

We continued.

Fifth.

Clear.

Sixth.

Nothing.

Every landing contained the same raw concrete walls, temporary lighting and construction dust. Every floor we cleared should have reduced the available variables and meant we were closing in on them.

Instead, the uncertainty only grew. A perimeter should constrict possibility. Ours seemed to keep expanding it.

At seven, Foster raised a fist. Everyone stopped.

A door stood open. Only three inches. It shouldn't have been. The team stacked against the wall.

Carter started to move closer. I caught his jacket and pulled him back. This time he didn't object.