Jonan’s Scheduled Cloud Archive

Jonan’s Scheduled Cloud Archive is the posthumous collection of investigative material that Jonan Etxaide makes accessible to Amaia Salazar through a cloud-sharing message. Arriving after his death, the archive turns scattered photographs, records, and maps into a working body of evidence: it reveals details hidden in the tomb of Yolanda Berrueta’s children, connects cases to the Baztán River, and gives Amaia the means to continue the inquiry Jonan could not finish.

Discovery and Access

Amaia discovers the message at home while preparing to return to work. She has left her computer running and notices an alert in an old email account that she rarely uses; it is not the official address at the police station or the personal account she normally checks on her phone. The sender is Jonan Etxaide, a colleague she has never known to use that address. More unsettling still, the message was sent on the afternoon of his funeral, when he had already been dead for more than a day and cremated.

The message identifies a shared collection of documents and images but supplies no usable title, only a row of asterisks, and requires Amaia to enter account details and a key. Its brevity offers no explanation of what Jonan has left behind. Amaia pauses over the blinking cursor, her hands trembling and her mouth dry, then enters the account information and opens the drive. The passage from message to archive is therefore also a passage from shock to investigation: the files give her something concrete to examine when Jonan himself can no longer explain his discoveries.

Structure and Contents

The drive contains about a dozen folders arranged alphabetically, including Ainhoa, Escenarios, Berasategui, Hidalgo, and Salazar. The documents within them do not follow a clear sequence, making the collection look more like a backup than a polished report. That uneven arrangement preserves the texture of Jonan’s work: a search warrant for Nurse Hidalgo’s home sits among an audio recording of Yolanda Berrueta’s police statement and the nurse’s employment history. In a folder marked Markina, Amaia finds photographs of herself with the judge on the esplanade outside the Baluarte auditorium.

The Ainhoa folder contains more than twenty-five photographs of the inside of the Berrueta family tomb, including close-ups of the coffins and their identifying initials. The images show the tiny hands of one baby protruding from a box and the blackened face of the other. Jonan has paid particular attention to a metal casket intended for ashes, which lies overturned and open. Its initials are H. T. B. A visible corner of the plastic bag inside bears part of a blue-and-red logo; Jonan has enlarged that detail and set it alongside photographs of French food packages, including a one-kilogram bag of sugar, whose logo matches. The sequence makes the packaging comparison legible as evidence rather than an incidental mark in a photograph.

Other folders widen the inquiry beyond the tomb. In Salazar, Amaia finds photographs of her twin sister’s empty coffin in a mausoleum in San Sebastián, images of the Mairu-beso bones left at the desecrated church in Arizkun, and close-ups of the clean white bones that belonged to her sister. The folder also contains enlarged views of the jacket Rosario wore on the night she fled, later found in the river, and maps marking possible routes on foot from Cueva de Arri Zahar. In Herranz, a short file on Judge Markina’s secretary is accompanied by photographs apparently taken inside a café, where the secretary is shown speaking with Yolanda Berrueta.

From Files to a Pattern

The archive’s Escenarios file lists the addresses of the infants who had died in sudden-infant-death cases already investigated. Jonan has added Amaia’s own sister to the list but left out Yolanda Berrueta’s sons. Amaia transfers those locations onto a map, includes her sister at Elizondo, and avoids marking Ainhoa. The points on either side of the N-121 initially suggest a possible alignment with a major road, a familiar consideration in serial-crime investigations, but the pattern does not fit that explanation.

When Amaia studies the marked locations more closely, the blue line of the Baztán River supplies a different geography. Excluding the children from Ainhoa makes the locations form a line along the water, from Erratzu through Elbete and Elizondo toward Oieregi. Jonan’s map does not itself explain the connection, but it gives Amaia a way to see one: the deaths may be related not by a convenient escape route but by their position along the river. That recognition changes the investigation’s scale. Amaia later argues that the river continues beyond Navarre, entering Guipúzcoa as the Bidasoa and reaching the sea at Hondarribia, so the search for comparable deaths must extend beyond the original area.

A Posthumous Handoff

The archive is more than a store of documents: it is the means by which Jonan’s unfinished work reaches Amaia after his death. She saves the files to a USB drive and deletes the automatically generated message, an act she experiences as breaking a nearly spiritual link—and as removing a connection that someone dangerous might exploit. Before leaving, she keeps the drive and takes a book by Aloisius Dupree with her, carrying both pieces of investigative material onward.

The collection’s significance lies partly in its incompleteness. It offers no explanatory report to settle the case; instead, photographs, administrative records, and a location list require Amaia to compare details and test a new pattern. The disturbed ash casket, the matching food-package logo, the omitted Ainhoa cases, and the river running through the mapped locations each become meaningful through that work of interpretation. Sent after Jonan can no longer speak, the archive preserves not a final answer but a set of leads—and makes the investigation a task passed from the dead to the living.