I never had any direct connection with either of The Sisters (capitalization intended), other than when they were very small children. It was Declan O’Dowd who told me this story and others about them. Although Declan came to know them eventually, he wasn’t involved in these events, as he was still living in Los Angeles at the time. But he heard about it later, from his girlfriend, Michaela “Kay” Hennessey, as well as from some of his other associates. I took what Declan told me, pieced it together with old newspaper clippings and some hints I got from Kay. She refused to speak openly about it to me, for reasons which will become clear when I tell you her and Declan’s stories—not today, but someday. I may have also taken some creative liberties, but since you weren’t there either, you wouldn’t know.

For now, imagine two sisters, both beautiful but very different. One dark and mysterious, in a way which draws you in and makes you want to solve the mystery, collecting one tantalizing clue after another. The other pale, with flaming hair, porcelain skin, fine-boned features, and eyes clearly hiding absolutely nothing. Kate was the dark one, the smart one, the decision-maker. Nicole was the redhead, always quicker to use her gun than her brains. Kate was warm despite her darkness, yet coolly calculating when necessary. Nicole was coldhearted but hotheaded. The Sisters balanced each other. Without Kate, Nicole would most likely have been doing life in prison for the senseless murder of some poor bastard who’d irritated her in an insignificant way. Without Nicole, Kate would probably have become a librarian or college professor, dreaming of bigger things, but not willing to do the necessary dirty work.

As it turned out, they both had plenty: big houses, fancy cars, expensive clothes, any man they wanted ready to do whatever they asked whenever they asked. The Sisters controlled all the rackets in the city, from drugs and prostitution to gambling and protection. They may not have been exactly what Gloria Steinem had in mind back in the 1970s when she talked about empowering women to achieve the kinds of success previously reserved for men. But they’d achieved a level of power and influence few other women had, including having more than one prominent politician in their pockets.

The Sisters weren’t full sisters. As they were fond of telling people, they were “half-sisters with different mothers and the same good-for-nothing father.” They’d gotten their start in the world of illicit business with a small inheritance from Kate’s mother, Helene, who I’d known since long before the girls were born. That inheritance was a two-story house two blocks to the east of what’s now called the Theater District. When Helene first acquired the house, the area had several different names: the Red-Light District, Hell Hole, Gin City, to name a few. Her establishment was relatively small-time, offering a variety of entertainments for “gentlemen.” It was an active house, doing a solid business, but Helene wasn’t a very good business owner. She frivoled away her profits on her own vices, which were many, the big one being gambling. Eventually, she had nothing left other than the house itself. When she died at the age of fifty in 1990 from emphysema, she left the house to her daughter, twenty-five-year-old Kate, and the girl she’d raised as her own, nineteen-year-old Nicole.

The girls’ father wasn’t quite “good-for-nothing,” as they described him, although it’s true he never did them any good beyond contributing his DNA. He was actually very good at some things. He was good at throwing a baseball sixty-feet-six-inches at a velocity opposing batters found nearly impossible to catch up with. He was also good at drinking gin and finding women to have sex with, which is how he became a regular customer at Helene’s House. It was largely because he eventually broke her heart that Helene went so quickly downhill. She had believed he loved her, perhaps because another thing he was good at was lying. And maybe he did love her once, in his own way.

But Billy Agostino wasn’t strong enough to attach himself to just one woman. Without Helene knowing it, he’d convinced half the women who worked for her he loved them as well. And at least one of those women—young Ruby, fresh off the boat from Ireland—had borne his child. The night Nicole was born had been one of the coldest on record, with a bitter wind blowing in off the ocean. Not much business was done that night, between the weather keeping people home and Ruby’s labor screams driving out the few who did wander in. Helene was incapacitated at the time, passed out in her bed with a belly full of gin. The other working girls had tried to help Ruby through it. One of them even ran out to try to find the doctor. But the doctor arrived too late to save Ruby, leaving Nicole without a mother or a father.

Helene did what she could to fill the gap, treating Nicole as her own daughter. But it was really Kate who watched over Nicole. Kate was six years old when her half-sister was born. That is, a mature, sensible, levelheaded six. So while everyone else in the house was working, or drinking, or sleeping off the drink from the night before, Kate watched over the baby. Then, as the years went by and Helene grew less in touch with reality, Kate eventually took over the decision making for the house. Even as a teenager, she displayed a far better mind for business than her mother ever had. It was partly common sense, but there was also an element of ruthlessness in Kate. She possessed a willingness to take advantage of other people’s weaknesses. And what better place to discover people’s weaknesses than a brothel, especially one frequented by the city’s rich and powerful. Before long, Kate had quite a collection of sensitive information about people who would do almost anything to prevent such information from becoming public. People who could do favors for a young entrepreneur.

What really put The Sisters on the map, though—what made their name in the city’s underworld and let everyone know they were not to be taken lightly—was the series of events which took place in the summer of 2000, and which came to be known as the Scott King Affair.

Scott King was a real estate developer of sorts. He owned a couple of apartment buildings and a strip mall just outside the city. He was also a gambler. He loved to play cards and to bet on horses, but he almost never won. Both Scott and his bookie, Geoff Billings, spent plenty of time at Helene’s House. When Scott built himself a bachelor pad apartment over the strip mall, he sublet his apartment in the city to Kate, who was looking to move out of the house. “Time to separate business from personal,” she’d told Nicole.

To say Scott “sublet” the apartment to Kate implies she paid him rent. But this was not strictly true.

“What if I could get Geoff to forget about the money you owe him?” Kate asked Scott. “Would that be worth, say, a two-year lease on your downtown apartment?”

“How would you convince him to do that?” was Scott’s response.

“Never mind how. Just assume I can. Would we have a deal on the apartment?”

“Sure.” Scott wasn’t confident, but felt he had nothing to lose.

Kate then went to visit Geoff, and made him this offer: “For a million dollars in cash, plus wiping Scott’s debt off your books, I’ll give you a one-third stake in my business, plus any help I can give you in expanding your share of the city’s gambling business.”

Geoff agreed almost instantly for two reasons. First, it sounded like a good deal. Second, and more importantly, he had long felt he owed Kate a favor, stemming from something she’d done years earlier, with a completely different objective in mind. It’s funny how things work out sometimes.

Flash back to 1980:  Fifteen-year-old Kate was walking through the parking lot of Charles Nelson Elementary School, two blocks from Helene’s House, on her way home from the public high school on the other side of town. Nine-year-old Geoff Billings, blond-haired, tanned from countless afternoons on the local ball fields, was sitting on the back steps of the school, crying. Kate knew Geoff from around the neighborhood. His father was a plumber who’d done some work at Helene’s House. He was also a drunk, but a happy friendly drunk and a good plumber.

“What’s going on, kid?” Kate asked, sitting beside Geoff.

Geoff started to get up, surprised and embarrassed, wiping tears from his cheeks. Kate placed a hand on his shoulder and he sat back down.

“Nothing,” he said between sniffles. “It’s nothing. Don’t tell anyone, ok?”

“Tell anyone what? I don’t know anything.”

At that moment, Mr. Antonito walked out of the school’s side door, heading toward his black Buick, which was parked over by the basketball hoops. He glanced at where Kate and Geoff were sitting but didn’t acknowledge them, just kept walking toward his car. Kate looked back at Geoff, who was now as pale as a sheet, tears again streaming down his dirty cheeks, and she understood.

It was one of those secrets that everyone seemed to know. Mr. Antonito, the math teacher at Charles Nelson Elementary, had a fondness for blond-haired boys, especially ones from troubled homes. And with an alcoholic father and a mother who was so afraid of her own shadow she hadn’t gone outside in two years, Geoff’s house had plenty of trouble.

Kate handed Geoff a tissue from her bag. “Wipe your face kid. I’ll walk home with you.”

As they walked together in silence, Kate formed a plan to put an end to Mr. Antonito’s extracurricular activities. It would involve a pair of lace panties from her own drawer, slipped into his briefcase along with a note, both of which he would find just as he was preparing to speak before the school committee, where he was scheduled to be presenting a new mathematics curriculum. The note would threaten to send incriminating photographs of him to the school committee if he didn’t tender his resignation and move out of town immediately.

Kate knew Mr. Antonito would be presenting his new curriculum to the school committee on the following Thursday because Helene overheard one of the committee members—who was a regular customer in Helene’s House—mention it as the reason he would be late to that night’s weekly poker game. On the evening of the meeting, she and Geoff sat in the back row of the nearly empty auditorium and watched Mr. Antonito open his briefcase. They saw how he kept both the panties and the note hidden from the view of the five committee members. He looked around and saw the two of them sitting there, then informed the committee he had received an offer to teach at a school in Atlanta. No one in town heard from him ever again.

So, Geoff felt he owed Kate.

Now, twenty years later, Geoff gave Kate the million dollars and wrote off Scott’s debt. Scott, in turn signed over to her the lease for his apartment on Main Street.

The one thing Kate had neglected to mention to Geoff was that he’d be dead before the end of the weekend.

You see, although she’d done what had seemed like a good deed for him two decades earlier, she’d really done it more as an exercise. She had been learning about power—how to acquire it and use it, how to recognize who had it, and how to take it away from them. She hadn’t really cared about helping nine-year-old Geoff nearly as much as she had about finding a way to take Mr. Antonito’s power away from him. Now it was grown-up Geoff who had a bit of power, and some money. Kate wanted—no, she needed—to take them from him. So, she did.

Kate’s next step was to go back to Scott King and convince him to transport the million dollars in cash to Belize. Scott was pretty much open to any scheme which involved getting paid, and Kate promised him $25,000 upon completion. Throw in the chance to surf in the Gulf of Mexico, and he was sold. Kate told him she was going into the drug business, and the money was to buy cocaine from a dealer in Panama. “I’d go myself,” she said, “but there’s too much going on here I need to keep on top of. Nicole will be in Belize, too, eventually, to keep an eye on the transaction and make sure everything goes smoothly. But I can’t trust Nicole with so much cash on her own. You know how wild she can get.”

Scott should have been suspicious, but logic was not high on the list of his talents. In the end, the promise of a payday convinced him, along with the opportunity to spend some time with Nicole, and to surf in the Gulf of Mexico.

As she had with Geoff, Kate left out the very significant detail that Scott would be dead within the next two days.

Scott took the money to Belize. Nicole, per Kate’s instructions, followed on a later flight, but not until after she’d cut Geoff’s throat and tossed him out of the window of Scott’s apartment over the strip mall, right into the open trash compactor. She had lured him there with this promise: “Wouldn’t you love to fuck me in Scott’s apartment? He’s such an asshole. He hates you. He’s always talking trash about you. Let’s go party in his place.”

While she was beating the best score on Scott’s personal pinball machine (a 1968 Playmatic Caravan), Geoff stood close behind her, admiring the way her jeans fit her hips. When she turned away from the machine, he was standing right in front of her, close enough to touch. Close enough that she could smell his desire. He put his hands on her hips, and she stuck her knife—the one she always carried strapped to her forearm inside the sleeve of her leather jacket—into his throat and sliced. She washed her knife and her hands in Scott’s sink, and wiped her fingerprints off the pinball machine, but left the rest of the crime scene as it was. Part of Kate’s plan was to make it obvious that Geoff had been murdered, but not who had murdered him. Nicole walked a couple of blocks to the corner convenience store and took a taxi from there to the airport, arriving just in time to board her flight. The plan was to give Scott the same treatment she’d given Geoff, minus the pinball machine.

But sometimes an opportunity arises which is just too good to pass up, and Nicole was always good at improvisation.

Arriving at Philip S. W. Goldson International Airport, Nicole’s attention was caught by the headline on the local English language newspaper:  SHARKS SPOTTED – TOURISTS FLEE BEACHES. Knowing sharks couldn’t be prosecuted for eating humans in any jurisdiction, Nicole set out to convince Scott to go surfing. Despite the sharks, he wasn’t hard to convince. Nicole knew Scott had two weaknesses—he liked to drink tequila, and he’d always been in love with her—and she knew how to play on both. Scott’s attraction to Nicole had been one of the many sources of friction between him and Geoff; they’d both wanted her. So, after several shots of Don Julio in the hotel bar while looking at Nicole in her green string bikini, listening to her whispering in his ear about how much she’d like to do it with him on a little boat out in the harbor then watch him surf back to shore, how much she’d love to see his tanned, muscular body shiny with seawater, Scott gave in.

They ignored the signs warning about sharks and the fact no attendants were working at the boat rental kiosk, and simply helped themselves to one from the hotel dock. Kate tossed her beach bag into the boat and jumped in as Scott guided it away from the shore. Shielding her eyes against the bright sunlight sparkling on the wave-tops, Nicole thought about what she could buy back home with her share of the million dollars, allowing herself the fantasy that Kate would let her just spend it. She knew Kate planned to use the money to build their business, and she knew that was the right decision, but she still dreamed about a new BMW convertible.

With Scott focused on steering the boat, Nicole pulled her knife out of her bag and crept closer to him. Much as she had with Geoff, she pressed her body against Scott’s, knowing his lust would further distract him. Once she was sure they were out of sight of the few tourists still on the beach, Nicole stuck the knife in his kidney and twisted. Shocked, Scott tried to push her away, but he was too drunk. He staggered in the small boat and fell to his knees. Nicole struck him on the top of his head with the handle of the knife, knocking him unconscious. She then tossed him overboard and watched as the clear blue water slowly turned dark from the blood seeping out of his wound.

Nicole waited, enjoying the feeling of the sunlight on her skin and smell of the salty sea-air, until she saw the tell-tale dorsal fin heading toward Scott’s body. Then she started to scream, and turned the boat back to the beach. It was an easy sell. “I told him not to go out there, but once he’s been drinking, you can’t reason with him,” she told the police.

Late that night, Nicole slipped out of the hotel with the million bucks, while the Belize Coast Guard were still collecting bits of Scott King on the beach. The next day’s newspaper headline read: AMERICAN BUSINESSMAN KILLED BY SHARKS WHILE SURFING.

Back home, the legend spread that Scott had killed Geoff, taken his million dollars to Belize, and then been eaten by sharks. No one knew what became of the money, which led some people to suspect a conspiracy of sorts: Maybe Scott hadn’t been eaten by sharks at all. Maybe he had faked his own death and disappeared into South America. A million U.S. dollars could last a guy for a long time down there.

Of course, the powerful people in the city’s criminal underworld, the important ones, knew one thing for sure: The Sisters had arrived.