Pamplona is the investigation’s practical center: a place where Amaia Salazar seeks judicial backing, meets Judge Markina, and returns to coordinate with her colleagues. Its busy streets and formal institutions stand in sharp contrast to the silence she encounters in Elizondo, making the city both a working base and a measure of the distance between the investigation’s different worlds.

Setting and investigative role

The city’s role emerges through a chain of professional encounters. When a problem of jurisdiction threatens to block access to information, Amaia calls Judge Markina directly and arranges to meet him at the Europa restaurant. The meeting gives her a setting in which to present evidence and press the investigation forward; the restaurant’s polished atmosphere also frames the visible difference between the judge’s surroundings and the urgency of her work.

Casework that exceeds the city

In Pamplona, Amaia Salazar turns a murder investigation into a comparison across places and police jurisdictions. Before Judge Markina, she sets out the link between Lucía Aguirre’s killing and the murder of Johana Márquez in Lekaroz a year earlier: both victims had an antearm severed at the elbow, and both killers died by suicide after leaving similar messages. The detail of the amputation had been withheld from the press in Johana’s case, making imitation from public reporting an inadequate explanation. Amaia argues instead that the repeated method and the unusual spelling in the Logroño killer’s wall message point to a distinctive signature shared across cases.

The pattern she describes is not simply a matching crime scene. The men were partners or relatives of their victims, with histories of prolonged abuse and, in several cases, alcohol or drug use and violent, impulsive temperaments. The post-mortem removal of the same arm, and the absence of the severed limb, are the discordant elements that suggest another hand may connect the murders. Pamplona becomes the place where these scattered details can be placed side by side, even as the investigation’s evidence reaches beyond the city.

That wider geography also exposes the limits of the investigative system. Amaia identifies two additional women born in the valley who were killed by partners and had later lived in Bilbao and Burgos; funeral notices published in valley funeral homes help her trace them. Whether either victim suffered an amputation is not yet known. The cases had not been joined because information was not routinely cross-checked across police bodies, while partner murders were often closed quickly after a confession and suicide. Amaia connects that administrative fragmentation to a wider silence: families’ shame can keep the crimes from scrutiny, and the division of authority makes it harder to see their recurring features.

Pamplona is also a staging point for the practical work that follows the comparison. After arranging for a molecular biologist in Huesca to analyze samples overnight, Amaia plans to travel with her assistant to Aínsa to guard them, with results expected the next morning; Markina offers to accompany them. Later, a police-station meeting is arranged for his return to Pamplona, where colleagues can discuss the discovery together. The city’s function is therefore less that of a self-contained crime scene than of a hub: evidence, personnel, and jurisdictional problems converge there, while the victims and possible links remain dispersed across the country.

The city as a working landscape

Amaia’s movement through Pamplona gives the investigation a visible rhythm of preparation, negotiation, and return to work. Before her meeting with Judge Markina, she drives first toward the outskirts and then back toward the center, using the time before their appointment to prepare. She parks beneath Plaza del Castillo, checks her reflection in the rear-view mirror, adjusts her red beret, and straightens the red uniform jacket bearing the Navarre coat of arms. The uniform makes her official purpose conspicuous when she enters the Europa restaurant: professional authority carried into an elegant room where she is sharply out of place.

The city’s police station offers a different kind of setting, less ceremonial and more collaborative. In heavy rain, water rushes down the steep slope beside the building into a channel that runs around it like a small moat. Amaia parks among the red cars marked with the Policía Foral de Navarra logo and goes to the room she has been using as an office. There, Fermín Montes is already at work, sleeves rolled to his elbows, drawing a diagram on a newly delivered whiteboard, with Jonan Etxaide and Zabalza beside him. Pamplona is not merely where decisions are requested; it is also where the accumulating evidence is made visible to the team and turned into a shared working problem.

At night, the city persists in Amaia’s thoughts as a counterpoint to the quiet of the valley. She misses Mercaderes, the street where she and James live, because it is rarely silent and feels populated and alive. That ordinary urban noise does not offer false reassurance: unlike the hush she associates with the valley, it does not suggest a peace that may conceal something beneath it. The contrast makes Pamplona a point of emotional orientation as well as a professional base, a familiar, inhabited world against which the investigation’s more unsettling landscapes are measured.

The limits of a single pattern

The investigation’s comparisons do not erase the differences among its cases. Johana Márquez was the clearest exception: unlike the other women, who had been born in the valley but later lived elsewhere, she was living there when she was killed, and her stepfather had no prior history of violence. Jasón Medina confessed to raping and strangling her, but his profile did not fit the violent, frustrated men in the other cases; his wife’s suspicions had arisen from the way he watched the girl and his increasingly controlling attention to her schedule, outings, and clothes. Those discrepancies complicate the theory that one offender’s signature unites the crimes. Pamplona’s role in the inquiry is therefore not simply to gather matching details, but to provide a base from which investigators can test a pattern against its exceptions.