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Robert Rotenberg is the author of several bestselling novels, including Old City Hall, The Guilty Plea, Stray Bullets, Stranglehold, Heart of the City, Downfall, and What We Buried. He is a criminal lawyer in Toronto with his firm Rotenberg Shidlowski Jesin. He is also a television screenwriter and a writing teacher. Visit him at RobertRotenberg.com or follow him on X @RobertRotenberg.

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1. Kennicott

KENNICOTT

FIVE FORTY-FIVE IN THE morning and, as it did six days a week, Angela’s cell phone alarm went off—like clockwork Kennicott often joked—to wake her up for her five-mile morning run. On a good week, when he wasn’t working on an ongoing homicide investigation or in court on a murder trial, Kennicott would haul himself out of bed, jam on his running shoes, and they’d hit the early-morning streets together. But today he wasn’t going to join her. He had somewhere else he had to go and for the last two hours he’d been staring at the ceiling, not moving a muscle. Thinking.

He felt Angela’s body jerk with the beep, beep, beep sound of the alarm and turned to watch as she groped on the floor beside the bed, fumbled with her phone, and clicked off the alarm. She rolled over and stared at him. Even in the dim morning light, he could feel her dark eyes piercing right through him.

“Did you sleep?” she asked.

“A little,” he said.

“You’re such a lousy liar,” she said as she slid the phone under her pillow and reached out to caress the top of his chest. “How long have you been up?”

He rolled his eyes.

She propped herself up on her elbow, hand under her ear, her eyes still fixed on his. She swished her long black hair back and forth making it ripple in the air like a dark flag waving in the wind.

“Do you want me to come with you this morning?” she asked.

“No,” he said, touching her cheek. “Go for your run.”

She eased his hand away from her face.

“Daniel, we’ve been together for more than three years, and every summer it’s the same thing.”

“I’m sorry,” he said, intertwining his fingers in hers. “You didn’t sign up for this.”

He had a sudden urge to kiss her, to squeeze her to him, to hold on to the moment so he didn’t have to face the next few hours. The tenth anniversary of his brother Michael’s murder was coming up and because it was a cold case, every year he had an annual “victim’s meeting” with the detective in charge of the file. Ari Greene, his boss and his mentor.

The meetings brought everything back to Kennicott: his guilt for arriving late for dinner with his brother on the day Michael was murdered, his belief that the killing was related to his parents’ suspicious deaths two years earlier, and his long-burning frustration that the case had never been solved.

He didn’t blame Greene. Michael’s murder was the detective’s only unsolved homicide, and Kennicott knew how much it ate away at him too. Still, every year when they’d have their early-morning meetings, it was the same story, like listening to a newscast over and over in an infuriating Groundhog Day–like nightmare.

“I wish I had better news for you,” Greene had said again last year. “No new leads.”

“You’re still working on something, aren’t you?”

“Always,” Greene replied, giving Kennicott his Cheshire Cat grin, the one he was famous for in the department, the one that said, “You know I always have a source working on this.” And Kennicott had learned over the years that homicide detectives never revealed their sources until they were ready to. Not even to each other.

“Thanks, Ari,” he said.

“Never thank me,” Greene said. “It’s my job.”

Angela lifted her head, put her hand on Kennicott’s shoulder, and gave him a friendly shove. “Roll over, mister,” she commanded. “I need to give you a cuddle.”

They disengaged their fingers and he let her roll him onto his side. He felt the warmth of her body curl in next to him. Her lips to his ear.

“Ever since we met,” she whispered, “you’ve been telling me you want to go back to that town in Italy where your brother was headed the night he was killed.”

“Gubbio. It’s called Gubbio.”

“Every year you come up with an excuse: You need to spend more time on the homicide squad. You’re working on a case. You’re involved in a trial.”

He found himself nodding.

“You told me,” she said, her hands gliding to the back of his neck, massaging him with her strong fingers, digging deep, “Detective Greene said you should always walk in the footsteps of your victim. I don’t understand why you keep putting off this trip?”

He took a deep breath in, exhaled.

“Sometimes it’s easier to ignore things that are too painful than to face them. I see that with families of homicide victims all the time.”

“Sounds like you’re hiding from yourself. What are you afraid of?”

Outside the window he could see the first hints of the sun brightening the sky.

“Maybe I’m afraid of what I’ll find.”

He rolled back over, kissed her on the forehead, slid out of the bed, went across to his clothes closet, and pulled out a shoebox buried under a pile of sweaters.

Sitting back beside Angela, he flicked on his bedside light.

“What’s this?” she asked, sitting up and piling two pillows behind her back.

Without saying a word, he took the top off the box, pulled out a pair of shoes, and tossed them on the floor. Underneath was a diary with the words ITALIAN TRIP written in his mother’s neat print.

“My father was a chemical engineer who consulted with pharmaceutical companies all around the world. He made a lot of enemies and I’m sure one of them was behind the car crash that killed them. So was my brother. Ten long years, we’ve never been able to find the link.”

He removed the diary and showed her the cover.

“Mom was a historian. She loved to go with him and make these diaries of her trips.”

“This is incredible,” Angela said, wrapping an arm around his shoulder and pulling him closer.

“This one was in my brother’s briefcase the night he was shot. Detective Greene gave it to me a few weeks later.”

“Why did he have this with him?”

“I don’t know. Just like I don’t know why Michael was going there. Or why my mother went there. I’ve always assumed it was to do some research while my father was having meetings in Rome.”

“Let’s look,” she said.

On the first page his mother had taped a photo of the Colosseum and written ROME above it. He kept turning the pages. On each one was a different picture of the ancient city with detailed notes.

He turned past a photo of the train station in Rome and on to pictures of towns along the route, clearly taken from a train window: Baiano, Spoleto, Campello, Trevi, Foligno, Nocera, Gualdo.

“Why were you hiding this in a shoebox?” she asked as the pages flashed by like an old-fashioned picture flip-book.

“I think I was hiding it from myself,” he whispered.

The train station photos ended. Next came a picture of a bus, then photos of the countryside, then a picture of a medieval hill town with the sign in front of it in large letters: GUBBIO.

“Oh, Daniel,” she sighed, her fingers tightening around his shoulder.

He was only a quarter of the way through the diary.

“If I decide to go to Italy, this will be my guidebook,” he said, beginning to turn through the Gubbio pages. “I’ll follow in my mother’s footsteps the way my brother wanted to.”