Infatuation (PLL Emison AU)

Humanity

A/N: Tread carefully, elements of NAT and troubling material ahead. Please review. I feel a little bit alone here.

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Chapter 21:

Humanity

The longer Emily stared at the image of Sara Harvey the more it started to unnerve her. Her corpse was swollen and water-logged and barely looked like a person. Her icy blue eyes were clouded over. Her straw-colored hair was a matted wet mess atop her head.

It had been three days since Emily had met her partner and a dozen other officers at the scene of the most recent Scarlet Letter Killer crime scene.

The body had already started to bloat due to the water she'd ingested. Someone had killed her in her shower. The lab geeks were already calling her Shower Harvey. They didn't have much sympathy for her. Most people in town had followed the case after her son died. Everyone believed she had drowned him in the tub, but no evidence had been found to prove it beyond a reasonable doubt. For the forensics team, she was the one that got away.

Turns out, she couldn't escape justice. It was a twisted form of justice, but many of them quietly believed it was a form of karma. Even so, the gruesome nature of the death brought about a serious air of professionalism in which the team could put aside their biases to assess the swollen corpse left behind.

Her body was posed, marred only in one place...the Scarlet Letter A on her cheek. Somehow it had been perfectly preserved. The killer had gone to a lot of trouble to keep it covered while the girl was being tortured and waterboarded. The careful precision pointed to someone who knew forensics, someone who was careful and meticulously clean.

One thing was clear. The SLK was sending the message that the woman was responsible for the death of her son. That was as clear as day. She'd even drowned in the same tub where her child had died.

What struck Emily as the most disturbing wasn't the way she'd been killed. The strangest thing was that the killer was starting to kill in a new pattern.

Young blue-eyed blondes. The killer was starting to target girls that looked like Alison.

She tried to pinpoint when her girlfriend had become the sick bastard's muse.

Had it been at the park when she was tracking Tim Roland? Had someone seen Alison that day?

Alison thought she'd seen someone watching them. Was it possible the killer was following her?

If that was the case...was Alison in danger?

Did the killer know what the blonde meant to Emily? Because she was looking at two nearly identical dead girls that bore a striking similarity to her girlfriend, and it felt like a threat.

Are you telling me to stop looking for you or you're going to kill her?

Or are you messing with my head because I already lost one girlfriend to a killer and you know I'll crack if I lose two?

Are you trying to distract me?

Am I getting too close to you?

It was clearly a direct message, but who was the message for? And what were they trying to say?

Seeing another dead girl who looked like Alison had caused another crack in her impenetrable foundation. The case was continuing to chip away little pieces of her armor, leaving her feeling vulnerable and powerless.

When she looked at Sara...when she thought about Iris...all she could think about was losing another girlfriend to this maniac.

She couldn't let what happened to Maya happen to Alison.