Inspector Iriarte

Inspector Iriarte is a field investigator in the Arizkun church desecration inquiry and an important point of contact for Amaia Salazar. His role is practical and evidentiary: he summons her to the scene, lays out the sequence of attacks, and reports what the police have tried. As the investigation widens, his questions also bring the case’s central uncertainty into focus: how a violent offender could appear at the right moment to take a victim’s severed arm.

Identity and Introduction

Iriarte’s first defining action is to call Amaia in the middle of the night. The church desecration is not normally the kind of incident that would take her from bed for a fifty-kilometre drive north, but the urgency in his voice makes the trip unavoidable. His call establishes him as the officer handling the local investigation and as someone who recognizes that the event may require expertise beyond routine vandalism inquiries.

The church is illuminated from within against the winter darkness when Amaia arrives. Uniformed officers stand by the entrance, while Iriarte speaks with two alarmed priests inside. The smell of burning hangs in the air; Amaia checks her instinct to reach for the holy-water font, and attention turns toward the altar. Iriarte gives her the scene rather than a settled explanation: there has been a succession of attacks, and the latest has left evidence of a small fire.

The Arizkun Church Investigation

Iriarte recounts the escalation in concrete terms. First, someone entered at night and broke the baptismal font in two. A week later, an intruder used an axe to smash a front-row pew. In the latest incident, a visitor brought a torch and set fire to the altar cloths. Because the cloths were linen, they burned slowly; the fire had gone out by the time the responding patrol arrived, and the intruder or intruders had disappeared.

The report also identifies how the latest attack came to light. A chaplain living nearby had begun keeping watch on the church after the earlier incidents. Seeing lights inside, he alerted emergency services. Iriarte’s account thus distinguishes what the police know from what remains unknown: there is a repeated pattern of entry and damage, but no identified perpetrator and no witness who saw the visitor leave.

When Amaia initially regards the matter as vandalism or desecration, Iriarte’s list of repeated incidents gives the problem a different scale. He does not claim that the attacks have a solved motive; instead, he provides the pattern that makes further inquiry possible. His measured inventory of damaged religious objects and the altar fire allows the investigators to compare separate acts rather than treat each as an isolated disturbance.

Police Measures and Local Context

Iriarte reports that a patrol car has been stationed outside the church around the clock. The visible presence has reassured residents: some have come to thank the officers, and no further incident has occurred since the latest attack. The pause is a practical consequence of the measure, although it does not establish that the person responsible has been found or deterred permanently.

The inquiry has also reached beyond the church grounds. Police have contacted the most active groups of young people considered prone to antisocial behavior, without getting results. Iriarte describes the young people of Arizkun as generally peaceful, with some involvement in separatist politics, and explains that the church is a symbol of the village to practitioners and non-practitioners alike. When Amaia raises the Agotes, the exchange shows that the community’s history and social divisions are among the possible contexts being considered; the available account does not establish that they explain the attacks.

From Desecration to the Tarttalo Pattern

Iriarte’s investigative world extends beyond the church incidents. In a later discussion with Amaia and Lieutenant Padua, he asks whether Jasón Medina had been lying when questioned. Amaia recalls Medina in tears, confessing that he had raped and strangled Johana Márquez and then violated her body. Yet he appeared perplexed when asked about the severed arm. He had left the scene to fetch a rope, intending to imitate a crime he had read about; when he returned, Johana’s arm was gone. The contrast between his admitted violence and his confusion over the missing limb makes the mutilation a separate investigative problem.

The discussion also recalls Medina’s sense that someone was watching him, a presence he had even imagined might be Johana’s ghost. That detail does not prove who was there, but it gives the investigators a reported circumstance to weigh against Medina’s account. In the wider case analysis, the repeated post-mortem removal of the same arm and the word Tarttalo, written with an unusual double t, distinguish a recurring signature from the perpetrators’ different acts of domestic violence. The investigators reason that whoever took Johana’s arm must have known the crime was happening; the conversation advances the possibility that the person had known and followed Medina. Iriarte’s questions help keep the inquiry focused on the gap between the confessed murder and the unexplained trophy, rather than collapsing both into a single offender’s actions.