Amaia investigates the stolen infant remains

Amaia Salazar’s investigation into stolen infant remains begins with individual graves and the anguish of parents who insist that their children are not where they were buried. It grows into a pattern connecting suspicious infant deaths, emptied coffins, and a secretive group linked to Argi Beltz and Lesaka. The investigation’s decisive turn is not simply the discovery of missing bodies: it is the recognition that the losses and the thefts may belong to a larger history of ritual violence, one that touches Amaia’s own family and changes how the bereaved are heard.

From individual deaths to missing remains

The case brings Amaia back to the evidence surrounding the Esparza child. The forensic report from San Martín confirms asphyxiation. The shape and measurements of the nose on the child’s teddy bear match the pressure mark on her forehead, and white fibers at her lips come from the toy. Saliva on the child’s face and the bear belongs to the girl and Valentín Esparza; a third trace accounts for the bear’s powerful, nauseating odor, but its origin has not yet been established. The details make the investigation material and specific: the child’s death is examined through marks, fibers, and traces, while the empty coffin and stolen body demand a separate explanation.

Amaia does not treat claims of missing bodies as self-validating, but neither does she allow a bereaved mother’s distress to settle the question against her. A priest tells her that Yolanda Berrueta comes to the cemetery each week, convinced her children are not in their grave. He remembers officiating at the funeral and watching the coffins lowered into the ground, and regards Yolanda’s insistence as part of her grief; he also confirms that she once tried to open the tomb. His account captures the conflict Amaia must investigate: the ceremony and witnesses appear to confirm burial, while a mother’s certainty persists against them.

That conflict is sharpened when Yolanda explains that, if the tomb had been opened earlier, she might have found that one child was missing without anyone recognizing the loss of another girl in Elizondo. She accepts that she was confused and frightened, and that medication led her to mix up the coffins, but maintains that the baby’s body was stolen. The point is not that grief makes every suspicion correct. Rather, Yolanda’s earlier distress had helped obscure a concrete possibility, and she now sees the discovery as a way the missing child in Elizondo might also be believed.

Mapping the pattern and opening the tombs

The case advances through practical obstacles as well as evidence. In Igantzi, Amaia and her colleagues open a family tomb under the pretext of repairs; the child is not there, and the available indications suggest the body was removed soon after death. The girl’s mother owns the tomb, while her ex-husband is abroad and has not yet been questioned. His absence alone does not establish responsibility, but the timing attracts attention: a municipal employee, his cousin, had told him the previous day that work was to be done at the family mausoleum.

A second inquiry is planned for Hondarribia. The child’s mother, divorced from her husband for years, is the daughter of a local justice of the peace, who offers a route for legitimate access to the family tomb. He explains that repairs can be carried out after eight in the evening, when the cemetery is closed, and that evidence of tampering would support a formal request to open a coffin. Amaia replies that a judge in Pamplona is already handling the case. The exchange shows her working between urgency and procedure: a grave may be inspected under a narrow practical pretext, but evidence of an opened or empty coffin can also establish the basis for official authorization.

The map supplies a different kind of lead. In Jonan Etxaide’s files, Amaia finds a list of addresses for investigated sudden infant deaths. He had added her own sister but removed Yolanda Berrueta’s children. Replotting the cases, Amaia first notices that the victims lie on either side of the N-121, then corrects her focus: excluding the children from Ainhoa makes the pattern more clearly follow the blue line of the Baztán River. The sequence reaches from Erratzu through Arraioz, Elbete, and Elizondo, and onward to Oieregi, where Haizea’s case extends it. The river is not merely a feature of the landscape; on the map it organizes separate deaths into a possible common geography. The words she associates with cleansing the river return alongside images from her dreams of enormous white flowers and empty coffins.

From grave robberies to the group’s history

In speaking with Markina, Amaia describes the evidence connecting families to Berasategui and the grief-support group at Argi Beltz. She recounts the Esparza family tomb, the earlier attempt to take the child’s body from the funeral home, the later desecration of a family tomb in Elizondo, and the events in Igantzi. She also identifies a recurring circumstance: the children were said to have died of sudden infant death syndrome, while their parents had connections to the Pamplona lawyers Lejarreta y Andía and to Berasategui’s group. One comparable case concerns Markina’s own former spouse. Amaia withholds some details, including the Elizondo and Lesaka cases and the possibility of a cult, but does not soften her account of Berasategui’s cruelty or his ability to influence people he presented as patients.

The investigation’s historical scale becomes explicit when Amaia tells Markina what a protected witness has reported. Doctor Xabier Markina, who maintained expensive treatments at his clinic in Las Rozas, was also the spiritual leader of a secretive group established in Lesaka and Baztán in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The witness identifies him and says that he saw and took part in the sacrifice of a newborn girl at a farmhouse in Lesaka. He also says members visited the group at Argi Beltz, where they were preparing for a similar sacrifice, and identifies Amaia’s mother as one of its members. The grave investigation therefore reaches beyond the recent disappearances: testimony connects the group’s earlier practices to people and places already inside the case.

Amaia adds evidence that the account of Ainara Martínez Bayón’s supposed death during a trip to the United Kingdom is unsupported by basic records. The child was fourteen months old, but no death certificate, autopsy report, or burial record exists; the alleged trip does not appear in her parents’ passports, as a trip of that period should have. Berasategui’s father has also confessed that he and his wife gave their first daughter to the practice. He links his wife’s subsequent depression to that act, describing a family history in which a child’s death was not only a bereavement but the consequence of an alleged sacrifice. Amaia keeps her suspicion about Sara Durán’s guilt to herself, distinguishing what she can report from what she only suspects.

Grief, disclosure, and consequences

The inquiry’s emotional stakes are not confined to the families whose graves may have been disturbed. While walking with Amaia, Markina tells her that his mother gave birth to his brother when he was twelve. The baby died at three weeks old. Markina remembers his mother trying to revive the child, his father struggling to pull her away, and the hours of cries that gave way to silence. His mother then stopped speaking to her husband and son except to ask where her baby was; she attempted suicide and was admitted to a psychiatric clinic. The account gives Amaia a view of the pain beneath Markina’s controlled public manner. It also echoes the investigation’s central danger: a child’s death can leave a family trapped in grief, guilt, and explanations that fail to account for what happened.

Yolanda’s testimony and the discoveries at the graves alter the balance between dismissal and proof. After a protected witness describes the sacrifice, Amaia promises a grieving man that she will catch whoever is responsible, but he answers that catching the culprit will not bring back the person he lost. The promise cannot undo the loss; its immediate force is to accept that the investigation is owed to those who have been left with it. At the same time, the revelations carry personal consequences. Markina tells Amaia that his father abandoned him when his mother lost her reason, leaving money for his care and education but no continuing relationship. Amaia informs him that his father, Xabier Markina, was allegedly the spiritual leader of the group, and that his name will surface if an official investigation opens. Markina responds by describing his father’s earlier affairs and eventual death on his yacht, but the evidence does not establish his own role in the crimes.

The case’s material clues continue to guide Amaia as the investigation widens. A tailor’s shield on a garment would not by itself prove anything, and many men might own bespoke clothes, but Amaia remembers that Markina wore a distinctive gray coat with a navy lining. The detail matters because it is specific to him, not because tailoring alone can establish guilt. Elsewhere, she learns that the ex-husband of the woman in Igantzi had been away since the day he heard about repairs at the family tomb; again, the coincidence directs inquiry without resolving it.

After the revelations, Amaia stops at Muniartea Bridge and watches the Baztán River flowing beneath her. Earlier, the river’s course had made the scattered infant deaths legible as a pattern; now its calmer flow gives physical form to the question of whether the river has been cleansed and the offense washed away. She returns home and cries in Engrasi’s arms for what has been lost, violated, and exposed. Only after exhausting herself does she prepare to act again. Among the calls that follow, she tells Elena Ochoa’s daughter that her mother did not die by suicide: Elena’s letter helped bring the dangerous group to a halt, and its members have been arrested. The investigation thus ends this phase by restoring one fact to a family while exposing the larger violence that had remained buried alongside the missing children.