Jonan Etxaide

Jonan Etxaide is a subinspector who works closely with Amaia Salazar, serving as both a practical partner in her investigations and, ultimately, her closest friend. His methodical research helps expose a gap in an official account of a child’s death; after he is murdered, evidence he gathered and left behind becomes essential to Amaia’s attempt to understand the crime. His story turns on the tension between the dependable colleague she knows and the concealed investigative steps she discovers only after his death.

Identity and Introduction

Jonan first appears beside Amaia in the midst of her professional and personal life. When the cars are full, he asks his boss for a lift to the police station, and she leaves with him. Their exchange establishes a working familiarity: he addresses her as his superior, while she responds readily and takes him along. The scene also places him alongside Markina, whose presence makes Jonan’s ordinary collegial gesture part of a more complicated personal moment in Amaia’s life.

At work, Jonan is an investigator Amaia can assign research and bring into the field. When a recorded image offers an uncertain clue, she directs him and other colleagues to join her while Zabalza examines the footage and audio. Later, after reviewing the confession of Valentín Esparza, Amaia asks Jonan to find figures on sudden infant death in the valley over the previous five years. He agrees at once. She explains that Esparza killed his daughter, despite his claim that he had delivered her to Inguma, and describes a witness’s account of a sect that had moved into a valley farmhouse in the 1970s, turned from countercultural gatherings toward occult practices, and discussed sacrificing newborn children. Amaia does not accept a demon as the explanation for the child’s death; she wants Jonan to investigate the pattern and history behind the claim.

Investigative Work

Jonan’s research into Ainara Martínez Bayón turns an absence of paperwork into a concrete investigative problem. He brings Amaia documents in a folder and identifies Ainara’s birth certificate: she was officially born in Elizondo on 12 March 1979, in a home birth at Argi Beltz, in Orabidea, and the certificate bears Doctor Hidalgo’s signature. But Jonan cannot find a death certificate. His checks also reveal no record in British hospitals of Ainara’s reported death, and no autopsy record to support the family’s account that she died of a stroke.

He follows the discrepancy beyond the medical records. His contact explains that the Spanish embassy would have been notified if a Spanish citizen died abroad, and that either repatriation or burial overseas would have left a trace. Jonan checks the family register and finds no entry recording Ainara’s death there either. A passport-office inquiry then confirms that the couple travelled to the United Kingdom on the relevant date, but neither passport lists a child travelling with them. The parents’ journey is documented; Ainara’s departure is not. By patiently assembling these missing records, Jonan helps Amaia see that the claim of a death in Britain lacks the expected official evidence.

Murder and Its Immediate Aftermath

Jonan’s murder abruptly turns Amaia’s dependable colleague into the victim at the center of her own case. When she reaches his apartment, Zabalza tries to stop her from entering, holding her close and pleading with her to stay out. Amaia finally forces him back by drawing her weapon and pressing its barrel against his side. Inside, Doctor San Martín is kneeling beside Jonan, and the sight confirms what Amaia has been unwilling to ask: her closest friend lies faceup in a pool of blood. He has been shot twice, once in the chest near the base of the neck and once in the forehead. The second wound has matted his brown hair with blood; the first has bled chiefly through its exit wound in his back.

Amaia advances with her pistol still in her hand, scarcely registering the alarmed officers around her. She has kept her breathing controlled until that moment, but the sight of Jonan’s body makes the horror break through. Her breath catches, the pain leaves her struggling to breathe, and she collapses to her knees beside him. The scene marks a devastating reversal: the investigator who had helped her pursue the valley’s hidden deaths has himself been killed, and the work of understanding the crime now carries the weight of personal loss.

The murder remains present in Amaia’s later investigation through physical clues as well as grief. At Jonan’s apartment, she studies the bloodstained living room and tests the forensic theory that the killer fired from a seated position. Looking beneath the sofa, she finds no sign it was moved; the dust lies evenly beneath it. When a cold draft lifts the curtains, a short, bright gray fiber falls away. It resembles the curtain’s color but is made of a different fabric, and Amaia can find no matching source elsewhere in the apartment. She photographs it, preserving a small piece of evidence that will later help her reconsider how the shots were fired.

The Investigation He Left Behind

After Jonan’s death, a computer audit unsettles Amaia’s understanding of how closely he had been watching her work. Investigators find that he remotely accessed her computer as many as twenty times in the preceding month, opening her email and stored folders and copying some files. The software required both computers to be on and an access request to be accepted from Amaia’s machine with a password. Because Jonan had to use it from the police station, the access was not a distant intrusion but something enabled within their ordinary workplace. Amaia is incredulous; the discovery makes his familiar presence at her side newly difficult to read.

Jonan had apparently anticipated that he might not be able to explain what he was doing. A colleague recalls that about fifteen days before his death he said he was preparing something for Amaia and asked that it be given to her if he could not deliver it himself. The remark does not establish that Jonan knew he was about to be killed: colleagues say he did not take his pistol when he opened the door, suggesting that he did not consider the danger immediate. It does, however, give the later discovery of his files the shape of a message left in advance.

The message reaches Amaia through an old email account she rarely uses. Jonan’s notification arrives two days after his death, at the time of his funeral, when he has already been dead for more than twenty-four hours and cremated. The shared item itself offers no explanation, so Amaia must work through the files one by one. Its delayed arrival prolongs the uncertainty around Jonan’s intentions: he has left her something tangible, but not the account that would make it immediately clear.

Among the material are photographs of Amaia with Markina and a file on the judge containing a short biographical history, including his birthplace, education, and previous postings. Jonan’s interest reaches into Amaia’s private life as well as the case, and she feels anger and helplessness at finding that he had read her email and assembled photographs of her relationship without her knowledge. Yet she chooses, for the moment, to trust the material as a final act of assistance. The password combines Ofrenda with Jonan’s police badge number, binding the file’s enigmatic name to his professional identity. One detail in Markina’s file draws particular attention: the address and telephone number of the care home where Sara Durán had been living, with the word mother marked as uncertain. Amaia does not yet know why Jonan singled it out.

The physical evidence at Jonan’s apartment also keeps his death open to renewed scrutiny. Ballistics identifies the weapon used in the two fatal shots as the same pistol used in a Madrid nightclub doorman’s murder six years earlier. That gun, associated with Eastern European criminal networks, had been found at the earlier crime scene and later disappeared from a Madrid court’s evidence store after a small fire damaged or destroyed some exhibits. The discovery prompts the prospect of further questioning by Internal Affairs, but it does not settle how the weapon reached Jonan’s killer.

A detail at the scene gives Amaia a different way to reconsider the shooting. Only one cartridge case was found in the apartment despite the two shots. Recalling the forensic reconstruction and the upward angle of the wounds, she revisits the possibility that the shooter stood before Jonan and fired through a coat lining or from inside a pocket. A light piece of fabric could have been carried by the shot and lodged in the curtains, where its similar color concealed it. The fiber she had photographed thus becomes more than an unexplained trace: it may connect the hidden position of the weapon to the trajectory that killed Jonan.

Relationships, Suspicion, and Legacy

Amaia’s response to Jonan’s murder makes clear that their bond exceeded the ordinary trust between a superior and her colleague. As she enters his apartment, she recognizes him as her best friend and, in her judgment, perhaps the best person she had ever known. His death collapses the distance between investigator and bereaved friend: she approaches his body with her weapon still in hand, then falls to her knees as grief overwhelms her. Later, standing before Markina with her face ravaged by tears, she asks him twice whether he killed Jonan. Her second question is nearly voiceless; the lamias cry outside, while the answer supplied in the scene remains only Markina addressing her by name.

Jonan’s murder also becomes a test of whether the investigation will acknowledge its own loss. Challenging Iriarte, Amaia reminds him that Jonan was working on the case when he was killed and asks whether institutional loyalty has led him to accept Inspector Clemos’s theory. Iriarte answers neither accusation: he leaves the room and retreats to his office. The exchange keeps Jonan present not only as the person Amaia mourns but as a murdered investigator whose unfinished work implicates the conduct of those still handling the case. His research, his concealed preparations, and the traces left at his apartment survive him, turning professional evidence into the means by which Amaia continues to pursue both the truth and the friend she has lost.

Presence in the Investigation’s Aftermath

In the wake of a humiliating setback, Jonan drives Amaia and their colleagues away while she gives the front seat to Iriarte and sits in the back, trying to put distance between herself and the silent passengers. When they reach the station, she takes over the wheel and leaves without speaking. The brief exchange of places gives Jonan a practical, understated presence in the team’s strained aftermath: even as Amaia withdraws into her own distress, he is still the colleague carrying her and the others through the workday.

Work Habits and Team Presence

Jonan Etxaide’s investigative role is visible in the way he moves between fieldwork and patient follow-up. When a recording yielded only an uncertain image and indistinct audio, Amaia Salazar told Zabalza to enhance both and brought Jonan and Fermín Montes with her to pursue the lead. On another morning, Jonan was already waiting in Amaia’s office with a cardboard folder, too excited to stay still; he shifted his weight and tapped the folder with two fingers before laying out the documents he had gathered. The restless anticipation gives a human measure to work that otherwise depends on certificates, registers, and missing entries: Jonan treats a promising discrepancy as something to carry back, check, and put before his superior.

The Unfinished Chain of Custody

The inquiry into Jonan Etxaide’s killing continued beyond the ballistic match, toward the missing links in the weapon’s custody. Amaia Salazar pressed for the specific Madrid court from which the pistol had disappeared and suggested contacting Zabalza for help obtaining the information. As she pursued that lead, heavy rain began drumming on the vehicle and a clap of thunder cut off the call. The interruption left the question open, underscoring how Jonan’s murder depended not only on interpreting the scene in his apartment but also on tracing a weapon that had vanished from official evidence storage.

Narrative Role and Unresolved Meaning

Jonan’s role in the investigation changes after his death: what had seemed like the dependable work of a close colleague must be reread alongside evidence that he had watched Amaia’s computer and collected material about her private life. The novel does not make those actions cancel his loyalty, nor does the evidence here fully explain them. Instead, his files and the forensic traces from his apartment leave Amaia with a difficult inheritance: facts he preserved, suspicions his choices provoke, and a murder whose meaning remains entangled with the trust between them. His unfinished investigation therefore survives not as a neat final message but as a set of fragments that require Amaia to continue searching.