Free Shards by Allison Moore

affair with Ed Mankell, I thought back to the wonderful letter he had written me when I graduated from recruit school, and it made me a little sad. A little disappointed in Sergeant Mankell. He had young children too, just like Keawe.
    Dina kept pushing a friendship, so one day I took her up on her offer to go out for drinks. I never did anything but work or hang out with Keawe, and it felt strange to sit in a bar with a girl my age. A girl in her twenties should have lots of friends , I thought.
    Dina liked to drink, and I watched her slam down a couple of beers while I had a soda. This was exactly why I didn’t like to socialize with other cops.
    â€œYou know about me and Ed?” she asked, after beer number three.
    â€œI heard.”
    â€œIt sucks,” she said. “I’m an idiot, I know. It’s just—”
    â€œMe too,” I said.
    â€œWhat? You? The perfect Officer Moore?”
    â€œNot so perfect,” I said.
    â€œWho is it?” she asked.
    I took a deep breath. I wanted someone to know. “Keawe,” I said.
    She nodded. “I can see it.”
    â€œI hate it,” I said.
    â€œI know. You love him, but you hate it.”
    It made me feel slightly better to have shared this with Dina. I made her promise not to tell a soul, but later Keawe found out that she had told Mankell.
    So much for making a girlfriend.
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    To avoid thinking about Keawe, I threw myself into work. Now that I was back in Maui, there were bigger players, bigger cases. Even though I was still on patrol, I started to build up a base of confidential informants, CIs. I wasn’t technically supposed to be doing that yet, but I found it really useful in my narcotics work. I was gradually discovering that operating by the book wasn’t always the best strategy for me.
    I found that building a strong CI base and keeping my CIs in line was a hard job. Every cop has a different technique. Some like to threaten people into being informants. For others, it’s all money-based. My thing was talking, building a rapport. If I worked a domestic abuse case, I would say, “What’s up with your husband? Why is he trying to fight us when we’re trying to arrest him? This isn’t just alcohol behavior. Is he smoking crack?” I would flat out ask if he was an addict, and to my surprise, a lot of the women would say, “Yes, yes, he is on drugs.” Then I could say to the guy after we arrested him, “Look, this is a problem. Now I know you’re smoking crack and I’m watching you. But you can help me out. Who are you getting your dope from?” Over time, as trust built up, they would lead me to their small-time dealers, who then led me to the major traffickers.
    I treated my CIs as friends, and they told me things that were happening in the drug world, things cops usually wouldn’t know. I found out whose girlfriend was sleeping with someone’s dealer, and I would target the girlfriend and say, “I know you’re sleeping around on this guy to get dope, so why don’t you work for me instead? That way you’re protected. You still get your dope, and I get my target.”
    Some of my CIs were addicts, and others were just people in the community that were scared and fed up with the drug dealers. It’s amazing the kind of people you meet in the drug world. I had one CI from Lahaina, a female, a solid CI. Sharon Benzos was a well-known real estate agent in Maui, forty-five years old, three kids, beautiful home in Keokea, drove a BMW—no one would ever pinpoint her as a meth user. She became a CI because I had arrested her for possession, and she was terrified of going to jail, terrified that her husband was going to find out. When I offered her the CI option, she took it. She understood that ice was bad for the community. She wanted to stop using, but she couldn’t; rehab wasn’t an option for her because