Amaia Salazar—Iriarte

Amaia Salazar and Inspector Iriarte’s working relationship is a practical, hierarchical partnership in which shared investigation depends on dividing tasks, testing interpretations, and respecting the limits of what the evidence can show. Iriarte contributes questions and fieldwork; Amaia sets priorities and directs the inquiry. Their exchanges show both the efficiency of that arrangement and its occasional friction, especially when Iriarte has not familiarized himself with material Amaia considers essential.

Roles and Division of Work

Amaia makes the partnership’s structure explicit when she briefs Inspector Iriarte, Inspector Iriarte, and Subinspector Zabalza on the day’s investigation. She and Inspector Iriarte will visit the chaplain and the parish priest in Arizkun, while Jonan Etxaide is to continue searching anti-Catholic websites, forums, and groups connected with the Agotes; Subinspector Zabalza is assigned to assist him. The plan places Amaia and Inspector Iriarte together on direct inquiries with church figures, while the wider team pursues possible ideological and online leads.

The briefing also reveals that Amaia’s authority extends beyond task allocation. She reminds the officers that Inspector Fermín Montes is suspended and may enter the station only as a visitor, barred from professional areas, files, weapons rooms, and case information. The warning is not presented as a disagreement between Amaia and Inspector Iriarte, but it establishes the procedural conditions under which their joint casework must proceed: access and information are controlled, not casually shared.

Disagreement and the Agote Hypothesis

After speaking with church representatives, Inspector Iriarte asks why a boy’s habit of staying at the back of the church matters. He offers ordinary explanations for that behavior and for not taking communion: a returning worshipper might feel embarrassed or unprepared. Amaia listens before setting out a more historically specific possibility. The boy’s position could reenact the exclusion once imposed on the Agotes, who were kept apart from other parishioners, denied equal access to the altar, and sometimes separated by a barrier in the church.

Inspector Iriarte points out that Amaia had seemed unconvinced by Jonan Etxaide’s theory of Agote revenge. Her answer makes her investigative method clear: she does not claim certainty, but will not discard a working hypothesis before a better one emerges. She also rebukes Inspector Iriarte for not reading the report Jonan prepared, since it would have supplied the background needed to understand her reasoning. Their exchange is therefore more than a difference of interpretation. Amaia expects disagreement to be informed by the case record, and she holds her colleague accountable when it is not.

Restraint in Pursuing a Suspect

When Inspector Iriarte suggests going to see the boy immediately, Amaia refuses to turn suspicion into a premature confrontation. She reasons that if he is as intelligent as she believes, approaching him without a solid basis will only make him close himself off. Instead, she directs Jonan Etxaide to search online for what the boy may have written or read. This decision shows Inspector Iriarte’s willingness to propose an active next step, but also Amaia’s control of timing: she prefers to gather context before testing the suspect directly.

Later, Inspector Iriarte reports that Subinspector Zabalza has spoken with the boy and his father. He describes the teenager as intelligent and depressed after his mother’s death, with visible marks from abuse by his alcoholic father; the boy claims he fell down the stairs. His blog appears to be an outlet for cultural interests, including an impressive account of Agote history. Inspector Iriarte concludes that the boy may use that history to escape his frustration, but does not believe he took part in the church desecrations. His description of the boy as fragile supports the earlier caution against treating an intriguing hypothesis as proof.

Continuing the Inquiry

With no further incident at the church and forensic reports on the mairu-beso still outstanding, Amaia proposes another line of inquiry: interview every catechist individually, at home. The parish priest may have overlooked or withheld something, she suggests, while the women might remember details he does not. She recommends that Inspector Iriarte go with Subinspector Zabalza, adding that Zabalza is likely to put older women at ease and may be invited in for refreshments as he asks questions. The suggestion combines a concrete investigative objective with attention to how an interviewee’s comfort can affect what she is willing to disclose.

The partnership is thus not a fixed two-person unit for every task. Amaia assigns Inspector Iriarte to church inquiries and follow-up interviews, but brings other colleagues into the work when their access or manner seems useful. Her confidence in directing the investigation coexists with a willingness to hear Inspector Iriarte’s questions and assessments; his value lies partly in observations that can be weighed against hers, rather than simply accepted.

Shared Reasoning About the Crimes

Their collaboration also reaches the central problem of the linked murders: the distinction between what the killers themselves did and the recurring removal of a victim’s arm. The case histories show violent men who confessed to killing women yet denied responsibility for the amputations. In Jasón Medina’s case, Amaia recalls that he confessed to forcing and killing Johana Márquez and abusing her body after death, but was bewildered when asked about the missing arm. He had left to fetch a rope and imitate a different crime he had read about; when he returned, the arm was gone.

That discrepancy becomes a question of opportunity and linkage. If Medina killed impulsively and had no plan, Amaia asks how the Tarttalo could have arrived at precisely the right moment to take the trophy. The proposed answer is that the killer had been following him. In this reasoning, the repeated amputation is not simply another detail of the domestic murders: its recurrence, the victims’ missing arms, and the alleged killers’ denials point toward an intervening person. Amaia and Inspector Iriarte’s investigative relationship is grounded in this shared effort to separate confession from explanation and apparent resemblance from the stronger pattern hidden beneath it.