Dupree

Agent Dupree is absent from the scene but makes his presence felt through a parcel sent to Amaia Salazar’s home: a weighty, carefully wrapped book whose annotations turn it into both a warning and an investigative prompt. Rather than giving Amaia a finished explanation, Dupree points her toward a reset—an instruction she begins to follow by remapping the children’s family homes across Navarra and the French border.

Identity and Presence

Dupree is identified as an agent and as the sender of the parcel. Amaia recognizes who sent it before she touches it, yet is surprised that he has chosen to send it to her home. His sharp handwriting covers the wrapping, and the package is secured with fine burgundy cord. These details make the delivery feel deliberate: it is not merely a book passed along, but an object arranged to arrive privately and command attention.

The parcel reaches Amaia after a day marked by Jonan Etxaide’s death. His formal uniform still lies on her bed as a reminder of that loss when she turns to Dupree’s package. The contrast gives the book’s arrival particular weight: while Amaia is still reckoning with a colleague’s death, Dupree supplies material that draws her back into the unresolved investigation.

The Annotated Book

Inside layers of paper and cotton is a dark, soft-leather volume without a title on its cover or spine. Its first page bears the title Fondation et religion Vaudou. The book is unusually heavy despite its delicate pages, which have gold-edged filigree, and its opening chapters describe the origins of a religion practiced by millions and official in several countries.

Dupree has marked a passage with a small black feather placed between the pages. In charcoal, he has filled the margins and underlined a description of the power to cause death at will, including the figure of a bokor or houngan who chooses to use that power for evil. Elsewhere he has circled the warning, «Un mort sur vous. Un démon sur vous.» The notes do not amount to a complete explanation of the case; they direct Amaia’s attention to language about chosen evil and to a threat framed in terms of the dead and a demon.

The Instruction to Start Again

Dupree’s clearest direction is the brief message he leaves in the book: «Reset, inspectora.» After checking the final pages for further annotations, Amaia paces through her house and begins to act on that instruction. Using an older computer, she prints a map of Navarra, then adds a second map because Ainhoa lies across the French border. With household notebooks, adhesive tape, and markers, she plots the places where the children’s families lived.

The resulting points appear irregular and initially disclose no coherent relation; most of the towns, however, lie in the Baztán Valley. Amaia recalls Dupree’s fuller injunction to forget what she thinks she knows and begin again from the beginning. His intervention therefore changes the method of the inquiry rather than supplying its answer: the marked book prompts her to suspend her existing assumptions and look anew at the geographical pattern.

Narrative Role

In this episode Dupree serves as an investigative guide at a distance. The book joins a broad account of Vaudou to ominous marginalia, while the feather, circles, and charcoal marks identify the passages he wants Amaia to notice. His notes turn reading into a set of clues, but leave Amaia to test their relevance against the case evidence.

The chapter makes the instruction concrete through Amaia’s map-making. The points do not immediately resolve into a pattern, and the French-border location requires her to expand the map before she can see the wider distribution. Dupree’s significance lies in prompting that change of scale and perspective: his parcel does not close the mystery but sends Amaia back to its evidence with a new starting point.