Amaia Salazar—Aloisius Dupree: investigative colleagues

Amaia Salazar—Aloisius Dupree: investigative colleagues is a professional connection grounded in a shared experience: homicide victims appear to both investigators in dreams or waking visions. In a conversation over beer in New Orleans, Aloisius Dupree offers Amaia a practical way to understand those encounters—as possible expressions of a detective’s mind processing evidence that conscious attention has missed.

A Conversation in New Orleans

The exchange takes place one night at a bar on Saint Louis Street, where Dupree asks Amaia whether the victims of her cases appear at the foot of her bed. Amaia is surprised; his question turns personal when he tells her that victims have visited him for years. Although she initially wonders whether he is joking, she recognizes from his expression that he is serious.

Dupree describes the experience as frightening at first. He had woken from such dreams sweating and anxious, unsure whether they signaled a loss of mental stability. A veteran colleague’s response helped him reinterpret them: rather than dismissing the visions, he should pay attention to what the victims seemed to convey. Dupree presents that advice not as proof of ghosts, but as a way of listening to the mind’s own work.

Dupree’s Investigative Method

For Dupree, the visions make sense within the demands of homicide work. A detective spends hours trying to understand an offender, then stands before the victim’s body hoping to learn the motive that might lead to an arrest. But a corpse alone may not explain the crime. Dupree argues that investigations can become too centered on the criminal’s mind and neglect the victim’s identity and circumstances.

He invokes victimology: the selection of a victim is not necessarily random, and even a deliberate attempt to choose at random may itself reveal a pattern. In this framework, a dream about a victim is not separate from investigation. It may be the subconscious mind organizing information already available but not yet consciously recognized. Dupree’s account gives Amaia an alternative to the blunt assumption that a detective troubled by such dreams must be emotionally compromised or mentally unwell.

Shared Attention to the Victim

Amaia’s subsequent casework displays a closely related insistence on distinguishing what is known from what only appears to fit. Faced with an amputation from the elbow made with a toothed, sharp implement, she initially considers ordinary explanations, including theft of a wedding ring or concealment of identity, while noting that those explanations make little sense in the victim’s own home. A photograph then reveals the word Tarttalo scratched into a cell wall with a toothbrush handle, turning an apparently incidental mark into a clue requiring explanation.

When Amaia compares the murders of Lucía Aguirre and Johana Márquez, she identifies the shared post-mortem removal of an arm and similar messages left by the killers after their suicides. The unusual spelling of the signature, with two t’s, and the fact that the missing limb was the same in both cases strengthen her suspicion that the pattern belongs to a single operator rather than to imitation. Her reasoning echoes Dupree’s emphasis on reading the victim and the details surrounding the death, not just the confessed offender.

The Limits of Similarity

The investigation also demonstrates why a recurring sign cannot settle a case by itself. Amaia identifies two more women born in the valley who were killed by partners elsewhere, in Bilbao and Burgos, but the available notices do not establish whether either victim was mutilated. The apparent pattern therefore raises questions without supplying a complete match.

Johana Márquez’s murder further complicates the profile. Jasón Medina confessed to forcing, strangling, and sexually violating her, yet said he did not know how her arm had been removed. He had left to fetch a rope after killing her impulsively; when he returned, the arm was gone. Amaia asks how a Tarttalo could have arrived at precisely that moment to take the trophy if the killing had not been planned. The distinction between Medina’s violence and the unexplained amputation keeps the investigation open to a second actor. In that careful attention to what the victim’s body and the crime scene do—and do not—explain, the professional affinity between Amaia and Dupree finds its clearest expression.