Between Limestone Ruins

Chapter Four

Walker understood why people hated Monday's. What he did not understand was the hate Wednesday got, when Thursday was clearly the worst offender. Thursday was so close to the weekend you could smell the whiskey, but far enough away that you feel guilty not working your ass off, even though it is day four of the week and you're exhausted.

It wasn't that he didn't enjoy what he did, Walker loved being a gun-toting federal cop with a badass military backstory. You couldn't make up shit that cool. But Alec Walker was in a slump. And people were beginning to notice.

The cold case to end all cold cases, one of the highest kill count serial killers in Canada since the Bernardos, had landed on Walker's desk. Women all dumped in Algonquin park. And he never found the guy. The case had been forcibly closed despite Walker's protests, so it now resided in Walker's desk, at the back of a drawer, with the other cases he hadn't brought to justice since the Algonquin case seemed to have cursed him.

Since that case took up residence in Walker's desk, more and more cases slipped through his fingers; murderers went free on technicalities, clues lead him on goose chases; anything that could go wrong seemed to be going wrong.

His cold case reputation had gotten so bad he'd been assigned a partner for the first time in his RCMP career, but at least is was Johnathan Miller. Johnathan was the field tech he'd pulled out of a grave in Algonquin and dragged home to help/force him to become a field detective, knowing his intelligence would have been wasted in a lab.

Johnathan had proven his gut feeling right time and time again, through training and now with his short time in the field. He seemed to make up for the losses caused by Walker's curse and Walker enjoyed working with him. Walker was just sick of the black cloud that lurked over every case assigned to him. Not that Johnathan seemed to notice the curse at all, he was annoyingly chipper, like a labradoodle.

Walker had not wanted to admit his skills were not what they once were. In the military he'd been special ops. Joint Task Force Two in Canada. There probably was little to no record of that fact, or the things he had done for the country, and Walker was fine with that.

It's said there are three reasons to join the military: sense of duty to one's country, you have family already enlisted, or you want a legal reason to kill people. Alec Walker was safely in the second reason, having followed in his older brother's footsteps. Neither was enlisted now.

Youngest brother Alec had been captured and held as a prisoner of war overseas for three months after taking a bullet to his shoulder. Not only was the wound not looked after, he was also tortured in an attempt to obtain classified information. The exact information he had been trained to resist torturing in order to keep it secret.

After having been rescued, Walker had surgery to restore most of his range of motion on his left side. Years of physiotherapy rehab followed, and he still didn't have full function back. Being right handed worked in Walker's favour, as the military advised the RCMP to hire him as a special agent, vouching for his abilities, so he was able to work almost immediately following his discharge.

In post-op, Alec learned of his older brother's death. Adam had driven over an IED, dead instantly. And Alec, having been raised by a brother only 4 years older than himself and an alcoholic father did the only thing he knew to do emotionally. He repressed all of it.

He had worked as a detective for the RCMP for almost a decade now, but as the Algonquin case grew colder, something stirred in Walker. The unfairness of it all. A monster got away with killing all these women. And it was Walker's fault. Maybe that unfairness paralleled the feelings he had regarding his brother's death. Maybe if Walker hadn't gotten captured he could have protected...