Mercy [Buzzfeed Unsolved]

2. Consultation

Shane didn't have a history of crime. Hell, he barely had a history of anything.

He had about as average of an upbringing as one could get - minus some interesting training patrols he had gotten for his job, but he wasn't personally involved in those anyways. There was only so much you could do with a suicide epidemic.

That being said, there weren't that many incidents, and they were normally spaced out. All they had involved was a bunch of paperwork and some on-scene investigation, since Shane usually ended up being one of the first officers on scene. That's partially the reason why Bennett had asked him to do any other body investigations if the more experienced officers were away.

Well, the sparkling clean slate of a history was just a tiny bit of a lie. He hadn't done anything, no, but the disappearance of his friend Stevie had a huge impact on him personally. That was decades ago though - simply a flicker of a memory that served its purpose as a benchmark in the timeline of his life. Every once in a while, Shane would think about the case and wonder what had really happened, but then something else in his life would come up and he'd forget about it all over again.

Then again, there had been a  significant piece of evidence from that case that Shane would always go back to thinking about. About a year later, someone had somehow found the waterlogged remains of a human toe washed up on a beach near where they had lived. With a few DNA tests and pathological investigations, they determined that it was Stevie's, and that he was probably dead now, somewhere in the ocean. The case was closed from further investigations, since there wasn't anything else they could pursue considering the wall of  conditions they had already met with.

Shane wasn't so sure though. Perhaps it was just his childish intuition and need for someone he loved dearly to be alive, but he had created all sorts of different scenarios in which a badass Stevie had escaped his captor and was now living on deserted island with his pet crabs and chickens.

Of course, all of those theories were from ages ago. Even if he had lived out a fantastic action movie lifestyle as a castaway, he would probably be dead by now anyways. Living for 20 years like that wouldn't be realistic. Plus, with all the technology now, there hadn't been a castaway for who knows how many years: they would have already long found Stevie by now, dead or alive.

Unfortunately, neither of those seemed to be the case.

Now, there was another mystery in Shane's hands. The interesting yet bizarre case of John Novel. 

To be completely honest, Shane wasn't even sure if John Novel was the murderer themselves. If this truly was as complicated as Shane thought, there was a possibility that John Novel hadn't even committed the murder of the woman just earlier. Why they had wanted to get Shane wrapped up in all of this was a mystery to him. He hadn't even grown up in Mercy, for fuck's sake. Why was he the one with any connection to the case?

Shane highly doubted that Adam had found anything from the name itself. It was most likely an alias or some sort of code. What could it have meant though? Nothing made sense, so Shane's mind started to wander aimlessly. 

John Novel... Volume Johnathan... Johnny Series... The Book of-

Bright white lights were suddenly turned on, blinding Shane of both sight and thought. Wincing, he squinted to try and see what was new in his environment. 

There was already a lot of new things about his environment. He was in a closed room, brick walls grey and dreary. There was what he knew was a one-way mirror in front of him, and other than that just a metal table and the metal chair on which he sat on. The only thing that was mismatched in the room was the worn wooden chair at the other side of the table. The light had come from the lamp on the table, which had been unceremoniously angled directly into Shane's face.