Belástegui Helps Rosario Escape the Clinic

Belástegui Helps Rosario Escape the Clinic marks the moment when Doctor Berasategui’s apparent place within the clinic’s medical order gives way to his role in Rosario Iturzaeta’s escape. Surveillance footage first confirms that he has taken her out of the ward; closer inspection shows that she is not being carried off but walking beside him by choice, turning a suspected abduction into evidence of collaboration.

Alarm and Surveillance

When the clinic’s director, Doctor Sarasola, could not reach Doctor Berasategui, he called security and ordered staff to find him and Rosario, whom he described as very dangerous. The warning establishes the immediate stakes: a psychiatric patient has disappeared from supervision, and the doctor responsible for helping her may himself be part of the danger. Iriarte asked whether the clinic had cameras. Sarasola, briefly reassured by the answer, went with Amaia to the security room, where staff were already reviewing the recordings.

The footage reconstructs the departure in stages. A doctor in a white coat accompanies an orderly pushing a stretcher; the patient beneath its sheet is unrecognizable. At the ground floor, the pair move along a corridor. In the next view, the orderly is gone, while the doctor supports a hooded figure in a long padded coat as they walk toward the rear exit. Sarasola initially reacts with disbelief at the sight of Rosario leaving on foot. The sequence does not show a patient being transported away helplessly: it shows Doctor Berasategui changing the apparent circumstances of the escape and guiding her out of the clinic.

The Orderly’s Assault and Berasategui’s Identification

The escape has a cost inside the clinic: security reports finding the orderly in a cleaning storeroom, badly injured by a stabbing. His disappearance from the footage is therefore not simply a change of personnel in the corridor; it accompanies a violent breach that leaves a staff member critically hurt. Sarasola closes his eyes, on the verge of shutting down, while Amaia redirects attention to the rear exit and asks where it leads. He answers that it opens onto the parking lot, still trying to explain the departure as a possible threat by Rosario. Amaia corrects that reading: the images show Rosario walking voluntarily and accompanying the doctor, not being forced along by him.

The security chief supplies a photograph attached to Doctor Berasategui’s identification card. Amaia recognizes him as the mysterious visitor previously seen at Santa María de las Nieves: the glasses and goatee make the connection. What began as an uncertain disappearance is now tied to a familiar face and a deliberate act of assistance. The clinic’s own images and staff records expose both the escape route and the doctor’s identity, converting suspicion into evidence that Berasategui has helped Rosario leave.

Rosario’s Return as a Physical Presence

The escape changes more than the clinic’s security situation: it forces Amaia Salazar to confront Rosario Iturzaeta not as a confined patient, but as a person moving freely through the world again. Although Rosario had been immobilized in the preceding days, she walks with a steady, if stiff, gait. Her padded coat reaches almost to her ankles; below it, Amaia can see legs that seem unnaturally pale and slippers dragging along the ground. The details make the escape bodily and immediate. Rosario is no longer an image behind institutional walls, but a figure whose movements Amaia must watch and interpret.

That sight unsettles Amaia because it collides with the mental picture of Rosario she has carried for years. The oversized slippers recall those once worn by her aunt Engrasi, an association that briefly overlays one vulnerable older woman onto another. Yet Rosario’s assured walk makes the resemblance feel wrong: to Amaia, seeing her upright is almost an aberration. The effect is not simply surprise at a patient’s recovery or mobility. The familiar domestic object becomes part of a frightening recognition, linking the present sight to memories that Amaia has kept beneath the appearance of ordinary calm.

The narration makes that return of fear an inheritance of lived experience rather than a reasoned conclusion. Amaia’s childhood terror resurfaces in the image of a little girl crying inside her, convinced that Rosario is coming for her. The escape therefore reverses the distance that confinement had imposed: Rosario’s departure from the clinic brings Amaia closer to the old danger, even before the consequences of the escape can be fully known. The scene’s force lies in that contrast between Rosario’s measured steps and the helplessness of the child-memory they awaken. The woman walks steadily; the fear she restores has never truly gone away.

The Wider Pattern of the Missing Arm

The identification of Doctor Berasategui gains a darker significance against the investigation’s emerging pattern. Amaia Salazar had initially treated the amputation in the murder of Johana Márquez as possibly incidental. Further comparisons changed that assessment: three cases shared the removal, after death, of the same arm, and the limb was missing from every scene. The killings otherwise bore familiar signs of intimate abuse—victims related to their killers, prolonged violence, substance misuse, and impulsive behavior—making the repeated amputation the detail that did not fit.

A word scratched into a prison wall sharpened the connection. One killer had confessed to his wife’s murder but denied responsibility for the amputation; after his suicide, investigators found the same misspelled form of Tarttalo that had been left in another case. The recurring inscription, with its unusual spelling, suggested not merely imitation but a distinctive signature. Amaia doubted that press reports could explain how another offender had reproduced the concealed details of the amputation so precisely.

Jasón Medina’s confession provided a clearer account of how the missing arm could point beyond the confessed murderer. Medina admitted raping and strangling Johana, then returning home to fetch a rope so he could imitate a crime he had read about. When he came back, her arm was already gone; he was bewildered when questioned about it. His violence was impulsive, not a prearranged plan that included taking a trophy. The investigators therefore reasoned that someone else had been present at the right moment—and, because Medina’s crime was unplanned, that this person must have been following him.

That theory recast the recurring mutilation as an action separate from the domestic killers’ own crimes: a hidden operator could identify violent men, anticipate or track their actions, and take the arm they left behind. The clinic scene places Doctor Berasategui within this larger atmosphere of concealed agency. The doctor’s recognized face matters not only because it resolves the mystery of the visitor, but because the investigation has already taught Amaia to look past the most visible perpetrator toward the person who arrives unseen, takes the missing piece, and leaves a sign.