Amaia Salazar—Jasón Medina: investigator and offender

Amaia Salazar’s investigation of Jasón Medina, who confessed to murdering Johana Márquez, begins as a case of intimate violence and turns into a search for the unseen hand behind a recurring criminal signature. Medina accepted responsibility for killing Johana but could not explain the removal of her arm; after his own death, a message addressed to Amaia connected his case to another apparent pattern and made her investigation personal in a new way.

Identity and Investigative Encounter

Amaia encounters Medina’s case in the aftermath of Johana’s murder, with the victim’s mother present as the court prepares to hear the matter. Sitting toward the back of the room, Amaia sees the woman in mourning, thinner than at her daughter’s funeral. The mother acknowledges her with a small nod. Amaia tries to smile but cannot; she recognizes in the woman’s washed-out face the torment of believing she failed to protect Johana from the monster she had brought into her home. When the secretary reads Medina’s name, the mother visibly tightens. The brief exchange of glances places Amaia’s professional role beside the family’s grief, while the name that provokes the mother’s reaction marks the accused as both a defendant and the source of an intimate catastrophe.

The connection between investigator and offender acquires an unexpected dimension when Teniente Padua shows Amaia a white envelope found in Medina’s jacket pocket. It is not simply a suicide note: it is addressed to her. Inside, on a plain white card, a single word stands alone: Tarttalo. Amaia feels a sharp pain in her abdomen and holds her breath without drawing attention to it. She checks the reverse of the card, finds nothing there, and passes it to Padua. The starkness of the message offers no explanation, but its deliberate direction makes clear that Medina’s final act was intended to reach beyond his own case and directly confront the investigator.

The Missing Arm and the Repeated Signature

Medina’s confession did not resolve the most distinctive feature of Johana’s death. He admitted the killing, but denied responsibility for the amputation. When Teniente Padua described the arm as having been severed from the elbow with a toothed yet sharp implement, such as an electric knife or jigsaw, Amaia initially treated the mutilation as possibly incidental. She considered whether Medina might have cut off the hand to take a ring or prevent identification, but neither explanation made much sense in a killing committed in his own home. The uncertainty was important: Medina’s responsibility for the murder was clear, while the missing limb suggested another agent or a purpose beyond the confessed crime.

A prison-wall photograph sharpened that distinction. Medina had left what the prison director called meaningless graffiti, scratching the plaster with the handle of his toothbrush. Though the wall had been painted over, the grooves remained legible in a photograph taken at an angle so the flash revealed the letters: TARTTALO. The spelling matched the word on the card addressed to Amaia, including the unusual double t. The wall was not merely another place where the name appeared; it showed that Medina had inscribed it before the message reached her.

Further examination disclosed how he had made the prison inscription. Medina’s right index finger was badly eroded, its nail gone and the skin worn down to raw flesh. He had no toothbrush among his belongings, and the cell itself offered no obvious clue until Padua followed a hunch and sprayed the wall with Luminol. It illuminated traces of blood. On the night before the trial, Medina had used his own blood to write the same name as the prisoner who had died by suicide in Logroño. Unlike that earlier prisoner, Medina killed himself outside the jail; Padua understood the difference as purposeful, because Medina had to deliver the envelope to Amaia. The message thus connected the two deaths while making Amaia its intended recipient.

The pattern widened beyond the two prisoners. Amaia told the judge that she knew of three cases, with reason to suspect there might be more. The recurring feature was not simply a similar kind of domestic murder: in each case the offender was related to the victim, with a history of prolonged abuse, violence, and often alcohol or drug use. Such circumstances fit familiar profiles of abusive killers. What did not fit was the postmortem removal of the same arm, which never appeared at the scene. In Johana’s case, the precise amputation detail had been withheld from the press, weakening the possibility that another killer could have copied it from public reporting. The repeated mutilation and the oddly spelled name together began to look less like imitation by several offenders than the signature of a single person operating across their crimes.

The Confession and the Unseen Accomplice

Amaia’s recollection of questioning Jasón Medina clarifies both the limits of his confession and the disturbing gap at its center. He wept throughout, his face running with tears and mucus, and admitted that he had forced Johana, strangled her with his bare hands, and raped her after she was dead. Yet when asked why he had cut off her arm, he appeared genuinely perplexed and could not explain how it had happened. The murder was his; the amputation, by his account and reaction, was not.

The sequence Medina described made that division more consequential. After killing Johana impulsively, he went back to his home to fetch a rope, intending to imitate a murder by the basajaun that he had read about in the press. When he returned to the borda, Johana’s arm was already gone. He also said he had felt a presence watching him, and had even wondered whether Johana’s ghost was haunting him. What first sounded like a killer’s confused account became a possible clue: someone had been close enough to take the limb while Medina was away, and he himself had registered that unseen presence.

Amaia and her colleagues therefore asked a question that shifted the case from resemblance toward contact: if Johana’s murder was impulsive and unplanned, how could Tarttalo have appeared at precisely the right moment to take the trophy? Their working inference was that the person behind the repeated signature already knew Medina and had followed him. The possibility recast Medina not as the sole author of every feature of Johana’s death, but as an offender whose crime had been entered and altered by another actor—one whose selection of killers and timing could explain how the missing arm connected separate cases.

Narrative Significance

The relationship is defined by a sharp asymmetry: Amaia is the investigator trying to establish the limits of Medina’s responsibility, while Medina becomes a conduit to a crime pattern he cannot account for. That gap prevents his confession from closing the case. Instead, what he cannot explain forces Amaia to distinguish the violence he committed from the violence carried out around it, and to treat his apparent confusion as evidence rather than exoneration. His final communication makes that investigative problem personal without making the two characters allies: Medina directs a clue to Amaia, and she must interpret it. Their connection therefore marks the case’s transition from a confession about one murderer to the pursuit of an unseen operator linking separate crimes.