Intuition and rational investigation

Intuition and rational investigation is the investigative principle Amaia Salazar comes to rely on: neither disciplined analysis nor instinct is sufficient alone, but each can correct and extend the other. The method lets an unaccountable alarm or sudden insight open a line of inquiry, while physical evidence and changing hypotheses determine whether that line can be trusted.

Forensic Evidence and Competing Explanations

An early example comes from the investigation into the death of Valentín Esparza’s daughter. The forensic report by San Martín confirmed asphyxiation. The shape and measurements of the teddy bear’s nose matched the pressure mark on the child’s forehead; white fibers at her lips belonged to the toy. Saliva traces on the child’s face and the bear’s fur matched the child and Valentín, while a third trace accounted for the toy’s strong, nauseating smell but had not yet been identified. The report made the bear materially significant without, by itself, resolving every question about how the child died.

Montes pointed out a possible alternative explanation for Valentín’s saliva: he could claim to have kissed his daughter goodbye when leaving her at her grandmother’s home. Amaia answered with another observed circumstance. After San Martín reported the saliva, she had asked the grandmother whether she had bathed the child; the grandmother had, before putting her to bed. In Amaia’s reasoning, the bath would have removed any saliva left by the parents. The sequence shows her testing a plausible defense against details of the child’s care rather than treating a forensic match as self-explanatory.

The same resistance to premature certainty appears when Amaia asks Sarasola whether Rosario is dead or escaped. He says that he knows only what the others know and that the river points toward an answer, but does not complete the thought. Amaia rebukes him for saying what he thinks is expected and asks him to help. The exchange makes the investigative problem explicit: a suggestive sign is not a conclusion, and deference to a ready-made answer cannot replace inquiry.

Intuition as an Investigative Alarm

While searching for the house Elena Ochoa had described, Amaia finds that her car’s navigation system repeatedly loses satellite reception. A paper map is of limited use among numerous bordas absent from official building records, and Elena’s directions are too vague to distinguish an uphill from a downhill location. At a roadside stop, Amaia marks the places she has already searched on the map and drinks coffee from an old thermos she remembers from Engrasi’s home. The ordinary pause brings back the terror of a dream from the night before, including the bodily sense of being immobilized and the lingering impression of Rosario’s presence.

Amaia wonders whether the dream is a night terror or an alarm that should not be ignored. She does not treat that uncertainty as proof. Instead, she recognizes that police method, rational analysis, old traditions, and intuition belong to the same world of investigation, and that their interaction can be productive. Her professional training does not require her to dismiss a bodily warning simply because it cannot yet be explained. Nor does the warning establish what happened to Rosario: it gives Amaia a reason to remain alert to a danger she already fears may be real.

The forest search also gives this method a physical setting. Amaia perceives the trees and the wooded road not as an obstacle but as a channel through which the mountain’s energy seems to flow. The landscape’s impression is subjective, but the scene joins sensory attention to practical searching: the unreliable navigation, the marked map, the isolated dwellings, and the remembered dream all shape how she continues to look. Intuition supplies vigilance, not a substitute for the work of locating and examining evidence.

Insight, Mapping, and Revision

Amaia also uses instinct to recognize the potential value of an idea before she can fully recover its source. After obtaining a partial victory in securing an order to investigate Fina Hidalgo’s records, she plans to examine birth and death certificates and establish whether Fina had connections to the families involved. She intends to question them separately and press for inconsistencies. On the drive, she recalls that something in the argument she made to Judge Markina had briefly struck her as crucial, though she cannot immediately identify what it was. She thinks of Dupree’s account of a sudden flash of insight: a momentary discharge that can illuminate a problem if the investigator is attentive. The flash matters because it directs attention back to an overlooked detail; it does not relieve Amaia of the need to find and verify that detail.

The map of infant deaths shows how that discipline of revision works. In Jonan Etxaide’s files, Amaia finds an archive of addresses for the babies whose deaths they had investigated. Jonan had added Amaia’s own twin sister, but removed Yolanda Berrueta’s children. Amaia plots the locations again, initially noticing that they lie on either side of the N-121 road. She considers whether a major route might explain a serial offender’s movements, but recognizes that this pattern does not fit the case. Rather than force the first explanation onto the data, she starts again with a new map.

This time she marks the victims’ towns, including herself and her sister, while leaving Ainhoa off the map. The locations form a line. When she looks more closely, the blue course of the Baztán River makes the pattern unmistakable: it runs from Erratzu through Elbete and Elizondo to Arraioz, with Haizea’s location extending the sequence to Oieregi. The change in interpretation comes not from a new set of deaths but from plotting the same evidence differently and recognizing the river as the pattern’s organizing feature. A remembered phrase about cleaning the river brings the map into relation with the imagery of her dreams, but the geographical alignment gives the intuition an observable basis.

Details That Become Leads

Later, a detail about Markina’s clothing becomes a possible route to evidence. Amaia recalls that the coat’s tailor-made construction and English label may matter; Professor Santos has suggested that a judicial order could provide access to the exclusive tailor’s client records. The detail is not conclusive: many men could have clothes made by an English tailor. Amaia narrows her attention by remembering that Markina had worn a gray coat with the navy suit and that the combination had struck her before. She checks the car’s call log and telephones Santos. The remembered garment thus becomes a testable lead rather than an accusation.

Across these investigations, the method depends on a repeated distinction: a clue may be meaningful without yet proving its meaning. A pressure mark, a bath before bedtime, an unexplained trace, a dream, a line on a map, or an unusual coat can each redirect attention. Amaia’s strongest deductions emerge when she returns to such details, compares them with other evidence, and is willing to discard an explanation that does not fit. Intuition generates and preserves questions; rational investigation gives those questions a form that can be examined.