Amaia Salazar—Lucía Aguirre: investigator and victim

Amaia Salazar—Lucía Aguirre: investigator and victim is a relationship formed across the boundary between police work and haunting. At first, Lucía is a missing woman whose family insists she did not leave by choice; as Amaia takes the case seriously, the details of Lucía’s life make that insistence increasingly difficult to dismiss. Lucía later returns in Amaia’s dreams, where her suffering becomes a persistent, if initially unreadable, appeal for help.

The Disappearance and Amaia’s Investigation

Amaia becomes interested in Lucía’s disappearance after her two daughters challenge the assumption that their mother had deliberately left. The case had been treated as a voluntary departure for months, and the preliminary inquiry had established that suitcases, clothes, documents, and money were missing from Lucía’s home. Amaia nevertheless reopens the investigation and insists on visiting the house herself, testing the apparent evidence of departure against the life Lucía had left behind.

That life was rooted in family and routine. Lucía had three grandchildren, taught catechism in her parish, and visited her elderly mother every day at the care home where she lived. The neat house offered its own quiet counterpoint to the missing belongings: Lucía’s photograph, smiling in the entrance hall, looked out over a small sitting room where crochet work rested beside pictures of her grandchildren. The bathroom and kitchen were immaculate; the main bedroom was made up, its wardrobe and dresser drawers almost empty, while the guest room held two small twin beds. For Amaia, the absence of disorder did not settle the question of whether Lucía had gone willingly. It sharpened the contrast between the signs of departure and the many attachments that made a sudden, unexplained flight seem implausible.

The Apparition as an Appeal for Help

Lucía’s absence first crosses into Amaia’s private life as a dream, appearing just as Amaia’s pregnancy has given her an unusual respite from the nightmares and fear that had long shadowed her. After a day investigating Lucía’s disappearance, Amaia returns home for her last evening of work before taking leave, with two weeks remaining until her due date. In the night, Lucía stands before her in the red-and-white knitted sweater seen in the photograph at her house, a gold crucifix against her chest. The familiar, smiling woman is gone: she looks confused and profoundly distressed, shivering as though buffeted by wind. Lucía’s lips move, but the wind swallows her words. Amaia wakes troubled by the encounter, and by the return of the fear and night terrors that pregnancy had seemed to banish.

The apparition returns after Ibai’s birth, now at the bank of the Baztán River. Amaia hears the wind before she sees Lucía, still wearing the conspicuously festive sweater and holding herself around the waist with her left arm. Across the turbulent water, Lucía’s grief reaches Amaia before her words do. This time Amaia meets her gaze and encourages her to speak. Lucía struggles against the wind, then falls to her knees; when she raises her face, she repeats a broken appeal that Amaia understands as a plea to move something aside and catch someone. Amaia promises to catch him. Lucía is already turning away, shaking her head as her face sinks into the river. The repeated encounter transforms the missing woman from the subject of an investigation into a suffering presence seeking a witness: what Amaia cannot yet hear clearly in the dream becomes an obligation she accepts.

The Case Becomes a Pattern

Lucía’s investigation changes scale when the condition of her body connects her disappearance to other killings. At first, Amaia treats the amputation cautiously: Lucía’s forearm had been severed from the elbow with a toothed but sharp implement, possibly an electric knife or jigsaw, yet Amaia allows that it might be incidental—perhaps an attempt to take a ring or prevent identification. Neither explanation fits comfortably with the circumstances of a killing in the victim’s own home. The uncertainty keeps the missing woman’s case open to competing interpretations rather than making the severed limb an automatic signature.

A photograph from Ramón Quiralte’s cell supplies a more unsettling clue. Though someone had painted over the wall, the photograph’s angled flash still revealed a word scratched firmly into the plaster: TARTTALO. Amaia later sets that mark beside evidence from the murder of Johana Márquez, killed by her stepfather, Jasón Medina. Both women had an arm severed at the elbow, and both killers died by suicide after leaving similar messages. In the Logroño case, too, the killer had written the same word in the same unusual spelling. For Amaia, the repeated combination matters more than any single resemblance: the precise amputation and the marked message point toward one individual operating across crimes whose immediate perpetrators appeared to be different men.

Her working theory distinguishes the killings themselves from the repeated act imposed on their aftermath. The men who confessed were commonly violent partners or relatives, often with histories of abuse, substance use, or volatile behavior; they confessed to killing, while at least two denied responsibility for the amputation. Amaia argues that the severing of the same arm, with the limb removed from every scene, does not belong naturally to the familiar pattern of domestic abuse. Nor does the detail seem likely to have been copied from press reports: in Johana’s case, the amputation had been withheld from the public. Lucía’s case thus becomes evidence of a hidden operator, not merely another isolated disappearance that ended in a partner’s confession.

The comparison also forces Amaia to test the pattern against its exceptions. Jasón Medina confessed to forcing and killing Johana and to violating her after death, but appeared genuinely perplexed when asked about the missing arm. He had left the scene to fetch a rope, intending to imitate a crime he had read about; when he returned, the arm was gone. Unlike the other killers, Medina did not fit the profile of a man with a history of aggression or accumulated frustration, and Johana was the only victim in the comparison who had been living in the valley when she died. Those differences do not dissolve the link to Lucía; they sharpen Amaia’s question about how a second actor could have known of an impulsive crime and arrived in time to take its trophy.

The Wider Pattern and Its Unanswered Cases

The investigation also leads Amaia beyond the cases already linked by matching amputations. She finds two more women born in the valley who were killed by their partners, one in Bilbao and the other in Burgos. Notices of both deaths had appeared in funeral homes in the valley, but the available records do not say whether either woman’s arm had been amputated. Their cases broaden the field of inquiry without confirming the pattern: for Amaia, the women’s origins offer a reason to look closer, not proof that the same hidden intervention occurred.

Amaia identifies a practical reason that such connections could have remained unseen. Cases were handled by different police bodies, and information about them was not systematically cross-checked. When a killer confessed and then died by suicide, a case could be closed quickly; the families’ shame could further silence discussion. The confessions therefore resolved who had committed the immediate killings while obscuring a separate question about the missing arms. Amaia’s effort to connect Lucía’s case to the others is also an effort to make scattered, prematurely closed investigations legible as a possible series.

The comparison remains provisional, especially where Johana Márquez is concerned. Her case shares the distinctive amputation with Lucía’s, but Jasón Medina’s circumstances differ from those of the other men: he lacked their evident history of violence, Johana was the only victim living in the valley when she died, and Medina seemed not to know that her arm was missing. Amaia does not treat those discrepancies as reasons to discard the connection. Instead, they direct attention toward the possibility that the killings and the removal of the limbs were separate actions, and that someone was able to follow an unpredictable crime closely enough to take the arm before the killer returned.

The relationship between Amaia and Lucía consequently develops through two forms of attention: the disciplined scrutiny of a detective and the intimate, unsettling act of receiving a victim’s appeal in dreams. Lucía’s family ties initially challenge the explanation that she simply left; the condition of her body then places her disappearance inside a wider pattern whose boundaries remain uncertain. Even when the investigation cannot establish which other women suffered the same postmortem act, Amaia’s refusal to let confession end inquiry gives Lucía’s case a continuing force: it becomes a route toward victims and evidence that fragmented investigations had left unconnected.