Amaia Salazar and Sarasola’s investigative collaboration

Amaia Salazar and Sarasola’s investigative collaboration brings an evidence-driven police inquiry into contact with Sarasola’s professional study of evil, religious practice, and historical belief. Its defining movement is from guarded questioning to shared analysis: Amaia challenges him to stop offering expected answers, while Sarasola helps her frame the apparent crimes as parts of a deliberately constructed pattern.

An alliance formed around Berasategui

Sarasola receives Amaia and Jonan Etxaide in his office already knowing that they have come to ask about Doctor Berasategui’s death. He explains that information travels quickly in Pamplona, in part because the prison director is connected to Opus Dei through his family. The meeting begins with this unequal distribution of knowledge: Sarasola is well informed, and Amaia and Jonan are alert to what he may know that he has not yet disclosed.

Their first questions concern Sarasola’s contact with Berasategui and the escape of Rosario. Sarasola acknowledges visiting Berasategui three times, each visit, he says, from a professional perspective. Berasategui’s activities had surprised him, and Sarasola describes his particular interest in cases where aberrant behavior approaches or is marked by evil. This expertise gives him a reason to have visited the imprisoned doctor, but it also makes Amaia test the limits of his account rather than accept his professional framing at face value.

Sarasola recalls that their conversations were technical and abstract. Berasategui was an accomplished professional who could answer attempts at analysis with a brilliant counterargument, so Sarasola says he shifted toward offering spiritual consolation. He maintains that accounts from people who have approached evil should not be trusted because they lie. Yet he also admits that he asked Berasategui about Rosario: the doctor changed the subject immediately. Sarasola asks Amaia not to continue holding him responsible for Rosario’s escape, and she says she no longer does. Her suspicion has widened beyond any single person’s responsibility to the possibility of a much more intricate plan.

A theory of the larger plot

The collaboration becomes more direct when Amaia asks Sarasola to help her interpret the case rather than repeat what the evidence superficially suggests. He proposes that Berasategui spent years inducing men to commit murders and deliberately constructed a plot to link Amaia to the case by leaving the bones of her ancestors in a church. He further believes Berasategui prepared Rosario’s departure from Santa María de las Nieves and the events of the night of her escape in meticulous detail. The apparent thoroughness of that planning leads him to a consequential conclusion: Rosario may still be alive somewhere.

Sarasola’s theory gives shape to Amaia’s own suspicion without replacing it. She brings him a photograph of the cave where Berasategui and Rosario had been preparing to kill her son, Ibai, and asks what he sees. Amaia argues that the Tarttalo murders may be the conspicuous tip of a larger scheme, designed both to reveal some information and to distract attention from something more important. She connects that possibility to the desecrations, the use of children’s bones from her family, the attempted killing of Ibai, and the Church’s alarm over a desecration that may initially have seemed less serious. By placing the photograph before Sarasola, she turns the exchange from a request for background into a joint reading of evidence.

History, belief, and interpretation

Sarasola responds by widening the inquiry’s historical frame. He recalls the inquisitor Salazar y Frías, who investigated supposed diabolical activity in the valley and across the French border. In Sarasola’s account, that investigator lived among local people for more than a year and concluded that magical practices were deeply rooted in the culture, existing alongside Christianity in a troubled fusion with older beliefs. Sarasola stresses the inquisitor’s investigative method as well as his conclusions: he presents him as an open-minded researcher who examined claims by investigating and verifying them.

That history matters to Amaia’s inquiry because Sarasola says the surviving records also contain unresolved crimes against children, including children under two and adolescent girls, and accounts of bodies disappearing after death. He notes that many such declarations were later dismissed as false after the Inquisition’s own practices were recognized as abusive. The history therefore offers neither a simple endorsement of supernatural explanations nor a clean dismissal of the past: it gives Amaia a record in which violence, testimony, coercion, and cultural belief are difficult to separate.

When Amaia asks about Inguma, Sarasola shifts from historical investigation to comparative demonology. He describes Inguma as a name for a being associated with sudden infant death and connects it to Lamashtu in Sumerian demonology, as well as to differing accounts in other cultures. He recounts traditions in which a night spirit sits on a sleeper’s chest, constricts the throat, or steals the sleeper’s breath. The range of names and stories supplies cultural context for the case’s imagery, but Sarasola’s emphasis is not simply that such beings exist. When Amaia asks whether he believes, he redirects her toward the power these beliefs exert.

Collaboration without easy agreement

Sarasola explains that an exorcism mass is held in Rome each morning for people seeking the release of possessed souls. Many of those who attend are referred to psychiatric care, he says, but not all. Amaia raises the possibility that exorcism can work as a placebo for people who believe themselves possessed. Their exchange preserves a difference in emphasis: Amaia tests claims against material explanations, while Sarasola treats belief as consequential even when a case may also call for psychiatric attention.

That difference makes the collaboration useful rather than frictionless. Amaia insists that Sarasola stop giving the answer he thinks is expected and help her; Sarasola, in turn, offers frameworks that range from Berasategui’s conduct to historical testimony and the cultural force of demonology. Their work together does not resolve the supernatural question. Instead, it helps Amaia pursue the concrete links among the planned escape, the desecrated remains, the intended attack on Ibai, and the possibility of a broader design. Sarasola’s contribution is to open interpretive paths; Amaia’s insistence on evidence keeps those paths tied to the investigation.