Berasategui—Rosario Iturzaeta

Doctor Berasategui and Rosario Iturzaeta are bound by a covert criminal partnership: he helps her leave the psychiatric clinic, and together they take Ibai to a cave where Rosario prepares to sacrifice him. Their alliance brings two strands of danger into the same scene. Rosario’s history of violence against Amaia Salazar becomes an immediate threat to her infant son, while Berasategui’s role in the wider pattern of ritualized crimes is made tangible beside them.

Formation and Criminal Context

The partnership is not introduced as an ordinary bond between doctor and patient. At the clinic, Amaia insists on seeing Rosario, and Doctor Sarasola leads her and Iriarte through a corridor of secured doors. The visit is interrupted by evidence that the patient has already been removed: security footage shows a doctor in a white coat accompanying a patient concealed beneath a sheet on a gurney, then helping a hooded person walk out through a rear exit. The person is later identified as Rosario, and the escape implicates a medical insider in getting her out.

That escape is the practical precondition for the alliance’s next step. The security recording shows Rosario leaving on foot in disguise rather than simply disappearing from the clinic unseen. The method depends on a companion who can move her through the building and past its safeguards; the later cave scene confirms that Doctor Berasategui is not merely associated with her disappearance but is present with her during the attack on Ibai.

The investigation’s earlier crimes supply a wider context for his role. In the case of Johana Márquez, Jasón Medina confessed to abusing and killing her, but was bewildered when questioned about the arm removed from her body. He had left to fetch a rope, intending to imitate a crime he had read about, and returned to find the arm missing. Amaia and her colleagues therefore distinguished Medina’s impulsive violence from the post-mortem amputation, which could not be explained by his confession alone. A similar pattern—the missing arm and the name Tarttalo scratched into a wall—had appeared in another case. The repeated, unusually specific signature suggested a single actor operating across crimes, rather than a collection of offenders independently copying what the press had reported. In the later confrontation, Doctor Berasategui appears alongside Rosario as the person who has joined her private violence to a larger, ritualized design.

Escape and Joint Action

The clinic scenes reveal the alliance through its consequences before Amaia sees the pair together. When she demands to be taken to Rosario, Doctor Sarasola warns her to consider whether she is ready. Amaia goes ahead, but the search ends in the control room, where security staff replay the footage of Rosario’s removal. Sarasola is stunned by what the images show. The breach is not simply a failure to keep Rosario under observation: an apparent clinician has helped her leave, and the disguised patient has walked out with that person.

The escape makes the clinic a point of transition between confinement and renewed danger. Rosario’s release places her beyond the institution’s control; the evidence does not present it as a recovery or a legitimate discharge. Instead, she reappears in a remote cave with Ibai, a knife, candles, and vessels arranged around the child. Doctor Berasategui is beside her, smiling with fascination and reciting something Amaia cannot recognize. Rosario kneels over Ibai and moves the knife above his stomach. Their positions and actions establish a shared undertaking: Rosario conducts the immediate ritual, while Berasategui encourages it and remains close enough to direct its progress.

The Cave Confrontation

Amaia enters the cave after hearing Ibai make one of his familiar small sounds. He is alive, lying at the center of an intricate pattern that appears to have been made from salt or white ashes. Candles warm the space; nearby are a wooden bowl, a glass container, and a metal funnel. These concrete preparations distinguish the scene from a sudden assault. Rosario and Doctor Berasategui have brought the child there and arranged an environment for the act Rosario is poised to perform.

Amaia points her gun and orders Rosario to drop the knife and move away from her son. Rosario begins to smile, then notices Amaia and studies her as an enemy. Doctor Berasategui, by contrast, tells Rosario to continue, ignoring Amaia’s arrival. That response exposes the difference in their immediate roles without separating their purpose: Rosario has the knife and stands over Ibai, while Berasategui tries to sustain the ritual in the face of interruption.

As Ibai’s crying grows louder, Rosario advances toward Amaia. Amaia keeps her weapon trained on her while tracking Berasategui, who seems almost amused. Rosario moves toward the entrance and disappears from view; Amaia then turns to Berasategui as he raises his hands and steps toward the cave mouth. She warns him that she will shoot if he comes closer. The encounter leaves the partnership visible in action: each adult poses a distinct danger, and Amaia must guard both the child and the space between them.

Significance of the Relationship

The relationship joins personal abuse to organized criminal behavior. Rosario’s return to direct violence against Amaia’s family gives the conflict its intimate stakes; Berasategui’s presence, encouragement, and prior role in her escape connect that danger to a deliberate criminal operation. The scene does not reduce their partnership to a simple doctor-patient association: outside the clinic, he stands with Rosario as she prepares to harm Ibai and urges her to proceed even when Amaia intervenes.

Their alliance also clarifies the distinction between an offender’s apparent confession and the signature that links crimes. Medina admitted to killing Johana, but could not account for the severed arm, which was gone by the time he returned. The repeated amputation and the unusual Tarttalo marking pointed beyond the convicted men’s own actions. Against that investigative background, Doctor Berasategui’s presence beside Rosario makes him part of the hidden agency behind the pattern, while Rosario becomes his partner in a new, immediate act of violence. The relationship’s decisive revelation is therefore both operational and thematic: the clinic’s apparent boundaries fail, and an alliance formed beyond them turns an infant’s vulnerability into the focus of a planned ritual.