The Confrontation at Tabese's Tomb and Discovery of Remains is the decisive collision between Amaia Salazar's investigation and the sacrificial system behind the missing children. In the rain outside the crypt, Amaia tries to stop Yolanda Berrueta from breaking into the tomb; inside, she finds the remains of at least twenty children. The discovery makes the investigation's suspicions tangible, while the confrontation with Judge Markina exposes the personal betrayal at its center.

Ritual Logic and the Search

The beliefs surrounding the killings give the children's age and circumstances a specific ritual significance. Jonan Etxaide explains that some cultures regard children under two as moving between two worlds, able to perceive both and therefore suited, in the cult's view, to serve as conduits to spiritual forces. The explanation describes the perpetrators' belief, not proof of supernatural power; its importance lies in how it gives their actions an internal rationale.

A witness later describes the demanded victim as an unbaptized girl younger than two. Baptism was treated as an offering and commitment to another god, while the child's death was supposed to be dedicated to evil and to Inguma. The group believed that the child's body had to be surrendered as part of the offering. Its rules also tied the victim's sex and age to a cycle: sacrifices were made in groups of the same sex and age, under identical circumstances, until the cycle was complete. The language of transition thus furnished a ritual explanation for selecting children, even as the ease of concealing an infant's death made the practice harder to detect.

Amaia's investigation had already begun to turn scattered infant deaths into a geographical pattern. When she remapped the victims' towns, the locations traced the course of the Baztán River from Erratzu through Elbete and Elizondo to Oieregi. That line, rather than the road that first seemed a possible route connecting the cases, brought the river into focus as the organizing feature of the pattern. The map joined the missing children to the recurring language of cleansing and offering; at the tomb, that investigative inference would meet the physical evidence Yolanda had insisted was there.

Yolanda’s Insistence and the Breach

Yolanda Berrueta’s attempt to open the tomb had long been treated as an extension of her grief. A priest who knew the family said she came to him every week insisting that her children were not inside and that, as their mother, she could feel their absence. He understood the force of maternal loss, but believed the children had been buried: he had officiated at the funeral and watched the coffins descend into the grave. That apparent certainty made Yolanda’s conviction seem to confirm her distress rather than point toward a crime.

The investigation eventually gave her claim a different meaning. Yolanda acknowledged that medication and confusion had led her to mistake the coffins, but maintained that she had been right about the essential fact: someone had taken her baby’s body. She also understood what a conventional inspection might have missed. If the tomb had been opened merely to reassure her that her other children were there, the missing girl might still have gone unnoticed, and another mother’s report that her own daughter was missing might never have been heard. Her insistence was not only an expression of bereavement; it had kept an unresolved absence in view.

At the cemetery, Amaia Salazar heard blows against the crypt door and Yolanda’s labored breathing over the rain. A small breach from an explosion had left the lock caught between the door and the wall, preventing it from opening. When Amaia reached her, Yolanda’s determination was unmistakable. She struck Amaia and knocked her against the steps; Amaia drew her weapon, but before she could control the situation, Judge Markina fired. Yolanda fell with a wound to the chest. Markina said he believed Yolanda was about to attack Amaia, but the shot abruptly turned an attempt to reach the grave into a fatal confrontation.

The Tomb and the Collapse of the Cover Story

Judge Markina ordered Amaia Salazar to keep speaking to him but not look inside the tomb, holding her at gunpoint as though he could still control what the scene meant. Amaia refused to accept that boundary. She told him he would not shoot her and entered the crypt, where a plain structure—a central altar bearing a heavy, ornamented wooden coffin—held evidence no explanation could contain.

At least twenty children’s remains lay in an oval around the altar. Some had been reduced to old bones; at Amaia’s feet was the swollen, badly decomposed body of the Esparza girl. Beside it, on an old shawl, lay a very white skeleton missing an arm, recalling the remains already associated with Amaia’s own sister and her empty grave. The discovery transformed the tomb from the focus of Yolanda Berrueta’s desperate suspicion into the physical center of a much wider crime. Amaia dropped her flashlight, fell to her knees, and wept with rage and shame as Judge Markina entered behind her and raised the lamp to illuminate the remains.

The sight also made the personal betrayal impossible to evade. Amaia confronted Judge Markina with the accusation that he had known his father was responsible and had concealed it. He answered that his reputation mattered less than the force behind the acts, describing it as older and more powerful than those who had served it. His words framed the cult not as an excuse that absolved its members, but as a power he believed preceded them—and one he had helped keep hidden.

The confrontation then turned to Jonan Etxaide’s murder. When Amaia demanded to know whether Judge Markina had killed him, he admitted that he had. Amaia raised her Glock at him, while Markina lifted Jonan’s pistol and aimed it at her. Iriarte fired from the entrance before Markina could shoot. The close-range shots brought him down beside Amaia; she took Jonan’s gun from him, and Iriarte confirmed the charge that Markina had killed Jonan.

The immediate aftermath widened the consequences beyond the crypt. After the storm, officials and investigators arrived, and Lejarreta y Andía’s lawyers were arrested at their office. Police searched Argi Beltz in Orabidea, where the first indications suggested Rosario Salazar had hidden during her disappearance. The exposed remains, the confession about Jonan, and the arrests made the tomb the point at which the separate lines of the investigation converged: the missing children were no longer a pattern on a map or a mother’s feared absence, but victims placed together in a grave at the heart of the concealed network.

Grief, Reckoning, and the River

After the confrontation, Amaia Salazar stopped at Muniartea Bridge while the sky still held a thread of silver light. The Baztán River had surged after heavy water ran down from Erratzu, sweeping its banks as far as Hondarribia; now it flowed quietly beneath her. At the bridge she wondered whether the river was clean at last and whether the offense had been washed away, but the question carried no certainty. Her tears fell onto the cold stone and slipped toward the water.

At home, Engrasi embraced Amaia, who wept in her aunt’s arms as she had when she was a child. She cried over fear, anger, bitterness, regret, death, blood, and bones, until exhaustion brought sleep; when she woke, the grief began again. Engrasi lamented that the doors could not remain closed forever while Amaia mourned the evils of the world. The embrace offered shelter, but not an escape from what had been uncovered: Amaia knew she had to be ready to act.

She made four calls and received one. The first was to Elena Ochoa’s daughter, to tell her that Elena had not died by suicide. The letter Elena left had helped Amaia stop the dangerous child-killing sect, whose exposure was now leading the news. This first act after the tomb’s revelation turns the investigation outward from the recovered dead toward the living people left with unanswered loss: the discovery has not restored what was taken, but it allows one family to understand that Elena’s final act helped bring the hidden crimes to light.