Arizkun is a hilltop village whose radiant pastoral beauty and streets steeped in the past frame the church desecrations and the discovery of human remains at the heart of the investigation. Its landscape offers an apparent stillness that the story steadily unsettles: the village looks idyllic, yet its stones hold histories that remain active in the present.

Setting and First Impression

A gusting wind had swept the clouds from the sky when Amaia Salazar and Inspector Iriarte walked from the church toward the priest’s house on the neighboring street. Arizkun seemed suspended outside ordinary time, raised on a hill beneath an unusually expansive light. Emerald-green meadows gave the surrounding countryside an almost flawless pastoral appearance, while the village streets seemed to preserve messages from a past that had never quite receded. The contrast is fundamental to the setting: beauty and historical depth do not soften the place’s darker history.

At the priest’s doorstep, Amaia noticed the crushed, dried body of a small bird, nearly unrecognizable. She could not tell whether a car or the force of the wind had thrown it to the ground. Inspector Iriarte admired the carved eaves of the nearby houses, which were a local emblem, and called the place beautiful; Amaia answered that it was cruel. The exchange gives the village’s scenic charm an uneasy counterweight before the investigation enters the priest’s home, making Arizkun’s loveliness inseparable from the violence concealed within its landscape.

The Priest’s House and the Village’s Young Witness

The route from the church to the priest’s house was only a short walk along the neighboring street, but the threshold shifted the investigation from Arizkun’s open hillside into a tightly enclosed domestic space. A woman of about sixty led Amaia and Inspector Iriarte down a long corridor, where the smell of wax and the polished floor’s reflections made the interior seem carefully ordered. Father Lokin received them in his office; Amaia saw that his pallor had not improved since his meeting with the bishop. His hand was cold and trembling, and a severe bruise stood out on his swollen wrist. He explained that he was hemophiliac and that the condition had caused hemarthrosis, then moved them to a small adjoining sitting room with uncomfortable imitation-leather chairs.

Father Lokin identified Beñat Zaldúa as a young villager who had begun attending church again only in the preceding couple of months. He knew Beñat’s family: the boy’s father was rough and did not come to Mass, while his mother, who had once attended, had died of cancer six months earlier. Lokin described the loss with sympathy rather than reproach, allowing that people bore grief in different ways. Before returning to church, Beñat had often been in the library since his First Communion; he earned good grades and had once told the priest that he wanted to study history. Lokin considered him well-behaved and said he did not get into trouble or associate with certain other boys. Those details make the teenager’s later involvement in the desecrations more complicated than a simple portrait of a habitual offender: grief, historical interest, and a desire to be seen all meet in the village’s contested past.

The investigation also followed the landscape beyond the church and its streets, into the wooded hillside and a cave behind a large rock. Although the sky remained fairly bright outside the trees, the light fell sharply inside the woods. Amaia and Jonan Etxaide carried rigid cases as they crossed a small bridge and climbed the slope, using powerful torches to reach the cave entrance. There they photographed the site and sprayed the wall with luminol, which reveals traces of blood through a reaction visible under a different wavelength of light. Wearing orange glasses to neutralize the blue illumination, they extinguished their torches and waited for the altered light to make what could not be seen ordinarily visible. The forensic procedure gave the cave a second, investigative visibility: beneath the village’s beautiful surface and the apparent darkness of the rock, evidence could still emerge.

Desecrations, Human Remains, and the Village’s Hidden History

The church’s desecrations turned Arizkun’s visible past into an active crime scene. When analyses of bones found inside the church produced an unexpected result, the police commissioner asked Doctor San Martín to repeat the tests; they were performed three times. Amaia Salazar explained why a conventional search for an official cemetery might lead nowhere: the remains were a Mairu-beso, the arm of a child who had died unbaptized, and such children had not been formally buried in cemeteries at the time. The bones therefore pointed beyond the church to a family burial place and a history of loss that the village’s public records might not preserve.

The desecrations continued while the investigation widened. In one attack, a small electric Bobcat rammed through the church’s perimeter wall, leaving an irregular opening roughly a meter high and wide; its bucket teeth remained embedded in the stone, surrounded by dark rubble. Police cars and local vehicles gathered around the building in the early morning. In a later account, the investigators explained that an arson attack on an old medieval palace in the area had drawn the patrol away, allowing the perpetrators to damage the church façade and leave more bones. The violence against the building was thus not an isolated outburst: it involved diversion, damage, and the deliberate placement of remains.

Beñat Zaldúa’s part in the attacks emerged as more complex than the role of a lone vandal. He had written a blog advocating recognition of the Agotes’ history and admitted that an adult had contacted him by email and encouraged him to act. At first, Beñat thought the collaboration would bring attention to his cause; the appearance of bones frightened him. He denied involvement with the remains and with the Bobcat attack. Although the police believed he had helped make events possible, they did not consider him the person who carried out the desecrations. His identification of Antonio Garrido, whom he recognized without hesitation, gave the investigation a route from the village’s history campaign to an adult suspect.

The evidence also made the church a deliberately chosen repository for a private family history. The bones left during the successive desecrations belonged to Amaia Salazar’s family and had been placed there intentionally. Amaia believed Antonio Garrido had learned where to find them by visiting her mother in the sanatorium while pretending to be one of Amaia’s brothers. In the police briefing, this discovery connected the desecrations to the investigation of the killings of Johana Márquez and Lucía Aguirre, whose bodies had been mutilated with a toothed instrument; a metal tooth found on Lucía Aguirre’s body pointed toward an antique manual amputation saw. Arizkun was therefore not merely the setting for attacks on a church: it was where a concealed family past was made into part of a wider pattern of violence.

Arizkun as an Investigative Nexus

The village’s significance widened as the bone evidence drew separate investigations into the same place. Amaia sought access to remains recovered from the cave so they could be compared with DNA samples from victims in the cases of Johana Márquez, Lucía Aguirre, and the Logroño murder. The comparison was a request, not yet a result, but it placed Arizkun within a broader inquiry into killings that had seemed geographically and personally distinct. At the same time, the police planned a parallel search for the source of the church bones and for the family grave or graves from which they had been taken—an especially difficult task because the unbaptized children represented by the Mairu-beso had not been officially buried in cemeteries.

The secrecy surrounding the remains proved porous. Although the police had not disclosed their discovery to the press, Amaia reported that people in Arizkun were already talking about it in the streets. The village’s close knowledge of events contrasted with the official investigation’s need to establish who had placed the bones, where they came from, and why they had been brought to the church. Beñat’s campaign for recognition of the Agotes’ history supplied a public rationale for the desecrations, while the deliberately deposited remains and their connection to Amaia’s family gave the attacks a private target as well. Arizkun consequently becomes the point where local memory, manipulated grievance, and concealed family history meet—not simply a picturesque setting for the case, but a landscape whose past has been made materially present in its church, its cave, and its talk.