Valentín Esparza’s attempt to take his daughter’s body from a funeral home begins as an apparent act of bereavement and becomes a crucial clue to the novel’s infant-sacrifice investigation. The episode turns on the gap between the medical explanation for the four-month-old’s death and Esparza’s insistence that he had to complete something with her body; his later admission that he delivered her to Inguma gives that insistence a ritual meaning, without definitively establishing how the child died.

Circumstances and Suspicion

The investigation initially had a credible medical account of the baby’s death. She had been born prematurely, with immature lungs, and had spent two of her four months in hospital. Although discharged, she had recently been seen by a pediatrician for a minor cold. Iriarte told Amaia Salazar that the doctor had no doubt the child had died from sudden infant death syndrome. The baby’s grandmother, who had been caring for her for the first time, was devastated and searching for an explanation, but she also reported a detail that troubled her: a small, button-like circle on the child’s forehead. When she raised it with her son-in-law, he abruptly ordered the coffin closed.

Iriarte accompanied the grandmother to the funeral home after she returned to the police station. There, they encountered Esparza leaving with a backpack. The way he held it struck Iriarte as wrong; its wet, misshapen bulk seemed unlike an ordinary bag. When Esparza saw the officer, he turned pale and ran. Iriarte caught him by his car, where Esparza shouted that they should leave him alone and that he had to finish what he had started. Iriarte initially understood this as a possible threat of suicide and wondered whether the backpack contained a weapon. The encounter’s first ambiguity was therefore practical as well as emotional: the police did not yet know what Esparza had taken or what he meant to finish.

Interrogation and the Body

When Amaia questioned him, Esparza did not describe his daughter as a child he was carrying away. He said he had been taking her body. Amaia noticed the distinction: a bereaved relative would more commonly speak of the baby or the girl, whereas Esparza’s wording made the dead child sound like an object. He offered little explanation of where he was going. Asked directly, he appeared confused and said he was going nowhere; he had only wanted to have her a little longer. When Amaia pressed him on why he had taken the body and been stopped beside his car, he fell silent.

His repeated demand that the child not be cremated sharpened the mystery. He said that the body must not be cremated and that he had to finish. The insistence was not presented as a simple request about funeral arrangements: it echoed the unfinished purpose he had mentioned during his arrest. Amaia connected the statements and asked what he meant by finishing. The body’s intended destination remained undisclosed, and Esparza’s silence left the immediate plan unresolved.

Admission and Ritual Meaning

Amaia eventually accused Esparza of killing his daughter. He shouted that he had not killed her, then supplied a different and more disturbing account: he had delivered her. The wording shifts the question from what he did to the child’s body to whom he gave it and for what purpose. Later, Zabalza reported that he had sent recordings from the cells to someone able to read lips. Although the audio was inaudible, the lip-reader was certain that Esparza had said he had delivered her to Inguma, like many other sacrifices. A search of the police system found no person or alias under that name, leaving the reference unexplained at the time.

Subsequent accounts of the cult’s beliefs provide a framework for understanding the admission, but do not settle every fact about this particular death. A witness describes a ritual in which a child was to be sacrificed to Inguma by being deprived of air, after which the body was to be ceded as an offering. The stated rules required a girl under two years old who had not been baptized; the group regarded the soul in the first two years of life as being in transition, and therefore especially suitable for an offering. Esparza’s daughter was four months old and female, but the evidence here does not establish whether she was baptized or prove that the ritual account describes precisely how she died. The doctor’s diagnosis and Esparza’s confession remain distinct parts of the case rather than a fully reconciled explanation.

Consequences and Significance

The episode makes the body itself the point of conflict. Esparza’s wish to keep his daughter longer sounds, at first, like grief; his insistence against cremation and his need to finish suggest that the body also has a purpose beyond private mourning. His admission that he delivered her to Inguma turns the attempted removal into evidence of a wider sacrificial practice, while preserving an important uncertainty: he denies killing the child, and the scene does not conclusively disprove the medical account of her death.

That uncertainty gives the incident its investigative force. The grandmother’s observation, Esparza’s odd handling of the backpack, his language about the body, and the lip-read confession accumulate into clues that cannot be explained by bereavement alone. The attempt is not simply a failed effort to take a daughter home; it opens a path from an apparently ordinary infant death to the novel’s concealed system of ritual offerings.