I sat in the interrogation room, and stared at the person across from me without really knowing what I was seeing. It was odd, in that way that I knew that I was looking at a suspect, and yet I didn't. The whole thing seemed strange to me; I knew what I was doing, and yet I didn't.
But maybe that was just because I was thinking, for once, before I spoke. Maybe it was because I could hear my partner's voice, but at the same time, I couldn't. It was odd in that way that I knew I was not alone, and that this suspect was. He hadn't asked for a lawyer. Instead, he was staring defiantly at the both of us, my partner and I, listening to us talk, and answering questions every now and then, whenever it struck his fancy.
I wondered as I looked at him how he could have been so convinced that what he had done was right. How he could have let himself get talked into this mess. Here he was, about to go down for two murders, not to mention grand larceny, among various charges of assault, and he was stubbornly insisting that he'd had to. That he hadn't had a choice.
Hadn't had a choice. I shook my head, unable to keep a disgusted look off my face as I cut myself off, and let my partner take over. Her voice seemed clearer, now, than it had a few minutes before, and as I continued to think, it suddenly hit me. I bit my lip to keep from laughing at the thought; it was amusing, in that oddly twisted way that was a figment of my own sense of humor.
This man was not everything he thought he was…nor was he anything that my partner and I had thought he was. No, he was hopeless, but we'd already known that. Gullible, because he had believed what he had been told; that there was no choice, that there was no other way, other than to get rid of those that stood in the way, not of his ambitions, but of someone else's.
"You're a puppet," I said after a while, finally breaking my silence, and I heard my partner's voice fade away again, thought I knew that she was still right there beside me. "Nothing but a puppet. You had a choice; you could've chosen not to do this, but you did."
The suspect shook his head at me, scowling. "No," he insisted, "No, that's not it. That's not it at all."
But now that I had figured out at what angle to approach this, I wasn't going to stop.
"It is," I said, insistent in my own right. "You acted on what someone else told you to do. Not on what you told yourself to do. You're being jerked around. Someone's holding you by invisible strings, and you do what they tell you, because you're afraid of what will happen if you don't."
"I'm not afraid of them," came the reply. "I've never been afraid of them. They don't control me."
"But they do," I said. "Every time you do what they tell you to do, they control you. Guy like you…you'd expect that you wouldn't let anyone push you around."
"They don't push me around."
"Yes," I said, "They do. But that's how you like it, isn't it? Knowing that every move you make is being controlled? Knowing that everything you do is being dictated to you? You're a pawn to them. They'll cut their losses and run."
"You don't know them."
"You're right. I don't. But I know enough that they've turned you into nothing more than a puppet. Someone to do their bidding. Someone they can jerk around, because they know that when they snap their fingers, you'll come."
"It's not like that."
"You're in denial, then. Can't say I blame you; if I knew I was being used like that…acting only when someone told me to, never thinking for myself…performing only to satisfy someone else, and never myself…"
Dead silence fell when no answer came. And then it happened…the explosion, the one I'd known would come. The suspect was hauled out of the interrogation room, shouting at the top of his lungs; he wasn't weak, wasn't controlled by anyone, no one could push him around. But the truth remained that he was, and they did.
The fact that he was in such denial about it was enough to let me know that. I stood, and watched until he disappeared from view. My partner came to stand beside me, and shook her head, an almost amused smirk crossing her face.
"How'd you know?" she asked, and I shrugged, because I had no idea where the puppet theory had come from; it had just come, and as luck would have it, I had been right.
We left the interrogation room together, then, her and I, and went to our desks, to fill out the paperwork that was already waiting for us, just the way we'd known it would be.
After a while, I got distracted, the same way I always did, and leaned back in my seat, eyeing my partner for a moment before turning away to look at other things. The words I had spoke in the interrogation room lingered with me, and I knew they would for a while.
I also knew that it would be something I thought of for a long while to come, because even with all the things that I'd seen, I still could not understand how someone could allow themselves to be used that way…to be used as a puppet, to serve everyone else's purposes…everyone's, but their own.