Iriarte

Iriarte is an inspector whose investigative work brings him into close collaboration with Amaia Salazar. He questions witnesses and suspects, assesses evidence across cases, and forms judgments that matter not only for the direction of the inquiry but also for whom the police choose to trust or exclude.

Role in the Investigation

Iriarte questions Beñat Zaldúa about his blog and its discussion of the agotes, a subject that has become relevant to the investigation. The boy arrives with visible injuries, while his father is described as drunk; Iriarte nevertheless addresses his questions directly to Beñat and waits for a response rather than treating the teenager as merely an extension of his father’s presence.

Afterward, Iriarte tells Amaia that the interview has revealed no connection between Beñat and the church desecrations. He describes a bright, grieving boy who is abused by his alcoholic father and whose blog offers an outlet for cultural interests and frustration. Beñat’s account of the agotes and their history in the valley impresses him, but Iriarte does not confuse knowledge of that subject with evidence of guilt: he cannot imagine the fragile teenager smashing a baptismal font with an axe. Amaia recognizes the tension in that conclusion—an apparently fragile manner cannot, by itself, rule out violence—but decides to trust Iriarte’s judgment and the investigative responsibility she has delegated to him.

Reading the Signature Behind the Crimes

The investigation’s central problem is the gap between murders that appear to have been committed by familiar kinds of offenders and a repeated act that those offenders cannot explain. In several cases, men confessed to killing women close to them but denied cutting off the victim’s arm; the arm was missing, and the amputations shared an unusual method. The word “TARTTALO.”, scratched into a cell wall with a toothbrush handle and later painted over without filling the grooves, supplied another recurring clue. Iriarte’s work takes place within this effort to distinguish the perpetrators’ violence from the signature left by someone operating around them.

Jasón Medina’s account sharpens the distinction. He confessed to abusing and killing Johana Márquez, then violating her body, but was perplexed when asked about the missing arm. After killing her impulsively, he had gone home to fetch a rope, intending to imitate a crime he had read about; when he returned, the arm was already gone. He had also felt watched and imagined that Johana’s ghost was following him. In the team’s reasoning, the timing makes the missing limb more than a detail of Medina’s confessed crime: whoever took it had to be present at the scene while an unpredictable offender was away. The emerging possibility is that the person responsible had followed Medina.

Iriarte’s later synthesis makes the suspected connection explicit. Confronting Doctor Berasategui, he points to the recurring sequence across the cases: Quiralte, Medina, Fernández, and Durán were all Berasategui’s patients; each killed a woman from his own circle who was born in the Baztán Valley; and the crimes carried the same signature. A trophy had been removed from every scene, cut with an old amputation saw obtained from Hospitalenea, where Antonio Garrido had been hiding. Iriarte thus connects clinical access, repeated victim and offender patterns, a distinctive post-mortem act, and the tool’s provenance. The argument is not simply that the murders look alike, but that the same hidden operator could have exploited the offenders’ separate acts.

His practical judgment is equally evident during the inquiry into Garrido. At the hospital, Iriarte accompanies Amaia Salazar as they identify the man arriving by ambulance from the Baztán Valley. Later, watching Garrido through the office’s glass partition, he notices that Garrido has asked the time twice and concludes that he is not going to make a statement but is only keeping the investigators occupied. When Doctor Sarasola is trying to locate the missing Doctor Berasategui and Rosario Iturzaeta, Iriarte asks whether the clinic has cameras, redirecting the search toward a source of evidence that can establish movements rather than relying on a suspect’s account. Across these episodes, he reads hesitation and delay as investigative facts, not as explanations to accept at face value.

The Case Made Visible

In the confrontation with Doctor Berasategui, Iriarte’s reasoning becomes a direct accusation: the same patients, the same pattern of women from their own circles, and the same missing trophy point beyond separate domestic crimes to a common operator. Berasategui answers by treating the deaths as suicides and insisting he can account for his whereabouts. Iriarte does not let that denial close the exchange. He opens another folder and lays six photographs before the doctor and his lawyer, turning the argument from a contest of assertions toward evidence they must confront. The photographs’ contents are not specified here, but the gesture makes his method plain: a theory must be made answerable to the record.

That moment completes a pattern in Iriarte’s work. He can distinguish a vulnerable teenager’s cultural preoccupation from proof of violence, and he can also recognize when a sequence of apparently separate crimes has a concealed link. Neither judgment rests on appearance alone. His conclusions emerge from particulars—the repeated circumstances of the cases, the missing arm, the tool’s provenance, a suspect’s delay, or the prospect of recorded movements—and his role in the inquiry is to bring those particulars into a form that can withstand denial.

Conduct in the Interview Room

Before questioning Beñat Zaldúa, Iriarte closes his laptop and puts his pistol at his waist, after hearing that the teenager is injured and his father is drunk. The gesture marks the encounter as a police interview with real risks, but his attention remains on the boy: he introduces himself, refers to the earlier phone call, and asks about Beñat’s blog and its discussion of the agotes. Iriarte’s readiness and his measured approach coexist in the same scene; neither the father’s presence nor the boy’s injuries displace Beñat as the person whose account he needs to hear.