Free Riven by A J McCreanor

erupted into a fireball and then the rest followed. Weirdo was halfway across the graveyard when he heard the sound of shattered glass as the windows blew, belching black smoke into the wet night.
    He stood for a second watching the scene, before running through the graveyard, over the wall, limping to his car and climbing inside. He headed home the long way, ignoring the distant wail of a fire engine. Felt a rush of pleasure. Andy Doyle would be pleased.
    Job done.
DREAMER
    The Dreamer turns in his sleep, eyelids flickering, unaware of the rain falling outside the window. Instead he is reliving another night, hearing the rain on another roof, the sound of breath leaving another man’s body. The groan of the wind outside. The night he had killed Gilmore had been the stormiest night since records began. He had watched the water course from the roof tiles as if the weather itself were trying to wash the house free from blood. The Dreamer moves in his sleep as images flash across his mind, blood mixed with matter. Blood and water. The blood of sinners mixing in some unholy communion.

Chapter 9
    Tuesday, 10 December
    It was six a.m. when Wheeler returned from her morning run. She showered, dressed and was out of the door twenty minutes later. On the way to the station she listened to a CD, humming along to Sonny Rollins while she systematically revised all the evidence they had gathered so far in the case. By the time she drove into the station car park, she had come to no new conclusions as to why James Gilmore had met with such a brutal death but she knew that the team would uncover more and more pieces of the jigsaw, until they had the complete picture. She opened the door to the station and felt the familiar sense of anticipation that descended on her at the beginning of each case.
    She was early for the briefing and sat nursing a black coffee, waiting for the others to arrive. The room was chilly; a forlorn halogen heater rotated mutely at the front of the room, giving off a bright light but precious little heat. The station would heat up as the day progressed and be sweltering before midday. Wheeler looked out of the window: it was still dark outside. Inside, the room was in a seventies time warp. It was a large room, walls the colour of vomit, the skirting a peculiar sludge shade. The parquet flooring had suffered over the years and was now chipped and pieces that were missing had been ignored, leaving the floor uneven. The obligatory fluorescent light flickered lazily overhead. By seven a.m. the room was full and the whole team was assembled; those on night shift were bleary-eyed, needing their beds, while the day shift were yawning, not long out of theirs, but Stewart had requested that everyone attend.
    Stewart strode to the front of the room and placed his notes on a desk, patting them firmly into place as if that would create some kind of order from the chaos of their predicament. He cleared his throat and looked at the team, keeping both his voice and his gaze controlled.
    ‘Can anyone tell me how in God’s name James Gilmore’s house got torched last night?’
    Some of the team looked at him, some looked at the floor, others studied the wall. All of them said nothing. Wheeler waited. She knew that the two uniformed cops who’d been in the patrol car were going to be
severely reprimanded
and that Stewart was going to
personally
investigate. And after that the two officers would still face disciplinary action. Wheeler, like the rest of the team, knew that the shit had hit the fan and was about to drip all over them.
    Then Stewart let himself go. ‘Did you hear what I said?’ he bellowed, banging his fist on the desk. In front of him, officers shifted uncomfortably on their seats but didn’t voice what they were thinking, that last night’s debacle had nothing to do with them. They were part of a team, and somewhere down the line of command someone had messed up and now they were all complicit.
    ‘But surely