Mariano Sánchez Supplies Berasategui with Lethal Drugs is the episode in which prison official Mariano Sánchez is confronted with evidence that he delivered the tranquilizer used to kill Berasategui. The confrontation establishes Sánchez’s role in getting the drug into the prisoner’s cell, but leaves his knowledge and intentions unsettled. His attempted explanation leads Amaia Salazar to revisit the surveillance record and notice a discrepancy surrounding Markina’s visit to the prison.

Evidence and the Interrogation

Sánchez enters the interview room in poor condition after a night of drinking: his eyes are red, his mouth is dry, and he has already asked for water three times. He opens by refusing to say anything. Iriarte does not need an answer to begin presenting the case. He places before Sánchez an enlarged photograph showing him at the door of Berasategui’s cell, putting something through its hatch. Berasategui was being held incommunicado, and Iriarte identifies the item Sánchez supplied as the medication that ended the doctor’s life.

Sánchez first contests what the photograph proves. He concedes that he approached the cell, but describes the encounter as no more than a handshake, explaining that he liked the prisoner. Iriarte counters with a second, physical piece of evidence: the pharmacy wrapper from the purchase of the tranquilizer. The pharmacist remembers Sánchez, making the purchase traceable to him rather than an unidentified visitor. Taken together, the image and wrapper undermine his attempt to reduce his contact with Berasategui to a friendly gesture.

Iriarte frames the exposure as more serious than a breach of prison rules. Sánchez faces the prospect of losing his job and being prosecuted for drug trafficking, but Iriarte also introduces Amaia, a homicide inspector, and makes clear that Sánchez may be accused of Berasategui’s death. At the sight of Amaia, Sánchez begins to tremble and puts his hands to his head. The questioning has shifted from an institutional violation to a possible homicide charge.

An Account Built for Leniency

Amaia offers Sánchez a possible way to help himself: if he cooperates, she may be able to tell the judge that he violated prison rules by bringing something to an inmate without knowing what it was. Her suggested scenario is that Berasategui may have felt unwell and asked for medicine to ease a stomachache. The distinction is crucial. The evidence places the drug in Sánchez’s hands and at the cell, but his knowledge of its lethal purpose is not established by the photograph alone.

Sánchez accepts Amaia’s proposed explanation with conspicuous eagerness. He says that this is exactly what happened: Berasategui asked him to buy medicine, and he had no idea what the doctor intended to do with it. He adds that Berasategui had told him to look after the doctor. The account gives Sánchez a defense of ignorance while also connecting him to the prisoner through a request and an appeal to care. The details are his assertion, not independent confirmation of what Berasategui said or what Sánchez understood.

When Amaia asks which judge Sánchez means, he answers that it was the judge who went to the prison that day. The interview has therefore produced more than an account of how the tranquilizer reached Berasategui. Sánchez’s explanation introduces a judicial visit into the sequence, and Amaia does not treat the mention as incidental. When he cannot recall more clearly and asks for ibuprofen, she leaves the room with the sense that something in the conversation has prompted a significant memory.

The Photographs and the Unresolved Visit

Back in her office, Amaia spreads out the photographs Jonan Etxaide had included in the Berasategui file. They include the images Iriarte had just shown Sánchez, taken from the recording that established the prison official’s role in supplying the drug. But Jonan’s selection continues beyond those images, through the hours that followed. In the later photographs Amaia sees herself entering and leaving the cell with her colleagues, the prison director speaking with Markina, and a sequence that also includes San Martín.

Several enlarged photographs show Markina alone. Amaia compares his appearance across the images: in the corridor photographs with San Martín and herself, he wears jeans and a blue shirt. In another photograph, he is dressed in a suit, apparently the clothing he wore in court and the outfit he had on when Amaia called that morning to alert him to Berasategui’s situation. The timestamp on this image reads noon. The difference in clothing and timing makes the photographs relevant to the question raised during Sánchez’s interview, but does not, by itself, settle why Markina was at the prison.

Amaia sets the images against what the prison director had told her. Markina had phoned to request Berasategui’s urgent transfer; because the director was out of town, he delegated the task to his deputy. The director had not said that Markina visited the prison, and the deputy had not mentioned a visit by the judge either. This silence sits uneasily beside Sánchez’s claim and the photographs. Amaia closes the file, takes the pen drive, and puts it in her pocket, treating the discrepancy as something to pursue rather than a conclusion already proved.

Consequences and Significance

The episode turns on two different questions that the evidence does not collapse into one: whether Sánchez supplied the lethal medication, and whether he knew what it would do. The cell photograph and the pharmacist’s recollection make his involvement concrete; his rapid adoption of Amaia’s hypothetical account offers a version of events that would reduce his culpability, but does not verify it. His recollection of a judge at the prison opens another line of inquiry rather than resolving his own responsibility.

The movement from the interview room to Jonan’s photographs gives the scene its investigative consequence. Sánchez arrives as the apparent route by which the drug reached Berasategui. Yet his mention of the judge sends Amaia back through a record that extends beyond the act of delivery, where the images and the director’s account do not fit neatly together. The drug’s passage into the cell is exposed; the circumstances of Markina’s presence remain a question. By ending with Amaia taking the pen drive, the episode converts an incriminating confrontation into the next stage of her investigation.