«Reset, inspectora»

«Reset, inspectora» is Aloisius Dupree’s instruction to Amaia Salazar to set aside what she thinks she knows and begin again. First appearing as a brief message in Dupree’s notes, it becomes more than a motto: it directs Amaia through a change in how she reads the evidence, from scattered locations to a pattern traced by the Baztán River.

Origin and Meaning

Dupree’s message is written beneath a set of premises in his notes. After turning to the book’s final pages, Amaia stops at its disturbing illustrations and checks that there are no further annotations from him. The brief instruction, «Reset, inspectora», gives her a way to approach the investigation when the existing explanations and arrangements of evidence are not yielding a clear pattern.

The fuller version makes its method explicit: «Reset, inspectora, olvide lo que cree que sabe y empiece de cero, desde el principio». The expression asks not simply for another look, but for a deliberate suspension of conclusions. Its force comes from the tension between the command’s brevity and the difficult work it entails: Amaia must rebuild the picture from the underlying facts.

From Instruction to Method

That evening, Amaia acts on the message by making a map. Still in her bathrobe and barefoot, she moves through the house before returning to an old computer, printing a map of Navarra, and attaching it to a shelf with tape. Using a marker, she plots the towns where the victims’ families lived. She soon realizes that the map is too small to include Ainhoa, across the French border, so she prints a second map and adds those children as well.

The resulting marks appear irregular. Most of the towns lie in the Baztán Valley, but the points do not yet seem to form a meaningful arrangement. Amaia recognizes that she has not solved the pattern and recalls Dupree’s instruction to start from the beginning. The phrase thus accompanies an unfinished attempt: it does not itself reveal the answer, but insists that the evidence be reconsidered rather than forced into a premature explanation.

The River Pattern

When Amaia later revisits the case files and maps, she changes what she includes. She plots the victims’ places of origin, adds her own twin sister in Elizondo, and leaves out the children from Ainhoa. With those marks in place, their linear arrangement becomes visible. The locations run from Erratzu through Elbete and Elizondo to Arraioz, then onward to Oieregi with Haizea; a thin blue line on the map marks the course of the Baztán River.

Amaia again recalls «Reset, inspectora» and forces herself to concentrate on what she knows. The revised map changes the apparent geography of the cases: what had looked like separate points now follows the river. The discovery does not erase the other details she has to reconcile. The river calls up the words «Limpia el río» and echoes images from her dreams—large white flowers and empty coffins. Sitting before the maps, she also holds together the book’s ritual instructions, Sarasola’s warning about the damaging nature of Berasategui’s files, and the sacrifices carried out by groups in Lesaka and Elizondo in the early 1980s.

Narrative Function

The expression marks a recurring turn from interpretation back to evidence. Its first appearance is private guidance from Dupree; its later recurrence frames a concrete revision of the map and enables Amaia to recognize the river as the line connecting the locations. The instruction therefore functions both as a procedural rule—start over when the pattern does not hold—and as a structural refrain, linking the investigator’s method to the investigation’s emerging geography.

That shift also sharpens the human cost behind the plotted points. As Amaia studies the cases, she thinks of children who were born only to die, whose lives were so brief that no one had even taken the trouble to give them an identity or a place of their own in the world. The map’s line is not merely a solution to a spatial puzzle: it gathers neglected deaths into a pattern that demands recognition.