Ignore the Pain

By J. L. Greger

Sara Almquist couldn't say no when invited to be the epidemiologist on a public health mission to assess children’s health in Bolivia. Soon someone from her past in New Mexico is chasing her through the Witches' Market of La Paz and on to the silver mines of Potosí. Unfortunately, she can't trust her colleagues on the fa

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bug Press
• Release date: Feb 28, 2019
• ISBN: 9780960028511

J. L. Greger

J. L. Greger is a biology professor from the University of Wisconsin-Madison turned novelist. The pet therapy dog, Bug, in her mysteries and thrillers is based on her own Japanese Chin. She includes tidbits about science, the American Southwest, and her international travel experiences in her Science Traveler Series. Her books have won awards from the Public Safety Writers Association (PSWA), the New Mexico/Arizona Book Awards, and the New Mexico Press Women's Association.

Book preview

Ignore the Pain

Science Traveler Series

Book 3

J. L. Greger

Bug Press

New Mexico

Ignore the Pain

Bug Press

An imprint of IngramSpark

Bernalillo, New Mexico 87004

http://www.jlgreger.com

Copyright, second edition ©2019 by J. L. Greger

First edition ©November 2013

Cover design by Barbara Hodges for Got You Covered Bookcover Design © 2019

ISBN (paperback): 9780960028504

ISBN (EPUB): 9780960028511

LCCN: 2019901716

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without the written permission of the author, except as brief quotations used in critical articles and reviews.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

DEDICATION

To Bug who patiently stayed by side during the whole writing process

Ignore the Pain

DEDICATION

CHAPTER 1: September—Linda Almquist Albuquerque

CHAPTER 2: Sara Almquist at home

CHAPTER 3: Linda in Albuquerque

CHAPTER 4: Two weeks later—Sara in Washington, D.C.

CHAPTER 5: Linda in Albuquerque

CHAPTER 6: Assistant Professor George Kummer’s perspective

CHAPTER 7: Mid-October—Sara in Miami

CHAPTER 8: Linda in Albuquerque

CHAPTER 9: Sara takes off to Bolivia

CHAPTER 10: Sara in flight to Bolivia

CHAPTER 11: Sergeant Elsa Grasso in Albuquerque

CHAPTER 12: Sara in flight

CHAPTER 13: Flight Attendant Marge’s perspective

CHAPTER 14: Lew Lewis in flight

CHAPTER 15: Sara at El Alto airport

CHAPTER 16: Linda in Albuquerque

CHAPTER 17: Xave Zack in La Paz

CHAPTER 18: Lew Lewis in La Paz

CHAPTER 19: Sara in La Paz

CHAPTER 20: Linda’s Perspective

CHAPTER 21: Sergeant Elsa Grasso’s Perspective

CHAPTER 22: Sara in La Paz

CHAPTER 23: Ed Poe on the Altiplano

CHAPTER 24: Sara near the Valley of the Moon

CHAPTER 25: Veterinarian Manny Roybal in Albuquerque

CHAPTER 26: Assistant Professor Diego Rivera’s Perspective

CHAPTER 27: Ed Poe by Lake Poopó in Bolivia

CHAPTER 28: Embassy Employee Pam Rodgers in Sucre

CHAPTER 29: Eric Sanders in Potosí

CHAPTER 30: Sara in Potosí

CHAPTER 31: Sergeant Elsa Grasso in Albuquerque

CHAPTER 32: Sara in Potosí

CHAPTER 33: Shantelle Eaton’s perspective

CHAPTER 34: Sara’s perspective

CHAPTER 35: Assistant Professor George Kummer’s Perspective

CHAPTER 36: Sergeant Elsa Grasso in Albuquerque

CHAPTER 37: Sara’s field trip to Cerro Rico

CHAPTER 38: Sara in Potosí

CHAPTER 39: Sara in flight home

CHAPTER 40: Sara in Albuquerque

THE SCIENCE BEHIND THE STORY

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

CHAPTER 1: September—Linda Almquist Albuquerque

Linda Almquist punched her garage opener with a forefinger distorted by arthritis. A painfully high-pitched screech filled the garage as metal scraped on metal. The door jerked to a stop, half-open. When she punched the button again, a pang of pain shot from her finger up to her elbow. The garage door thudded as it hit the cement. Then it whined as it trembled upward before stopping halfway open again.

This was going to be a bad morning. Not surprising. She hadn’t gotten home from work until almost ten last night and to bed until midnight. She pounded the button in frustration. The door slowly opened all the way this time.

She grabbed the Albuquerque Journal laying on the driveway and glanced at the headline: Burned Body Found on Mesa. She frowned as she tried to remember whether this was the third or fourth body this year. She threw the paper on the back seat before she backed her Buick out of her garage.

When she arrived at work, she wasted no time with the newspaper and burrowed into the crises of the day. Linda would have liked her office to be as cozy as her home with lots of paisley prints, but she never found the time for the nonessential activity of decorating her office in the deans’ office complex in the medical school. So, the tiny gray office, which was packed with black steel file cabinets and book-lined shelves remained neat and impersonal, except for a silver-framed picture of her large tortoiseshell Persian cat Turtle and a smaller gold-framed photo of Bug, her sister’s Japanese Chin.

An hour later, Omar Ortega plopped onto a chair by her desk and said, How’s my favorite associate dean? Omar was slightly overweight and usually a bit disheveled, but this morning he looked quite distinguished in his starched white lab coat and a red and black striped tie. She figured he hadn’t been to the autopsy suite, where he was the associate director, yet today and was appearing in his second role as an assistant dean.

You’re looking spiffy today. What’s up?

"Same old stuff. You see the Albuquerque Journal today?"

She rubbed her eyes, glad that she hadn’t bothered with eyeliner. Just the headline. You the lucky one who got to autopsy the burned residue? I decided after watching one burn patient—a moaning, red, oozing mass of pain—die slowly when I was a medical student that I didn’t want to work with burn patients.

Omar grimaced in agreement. At least this one was dead before he was burned. Though the body showed signs of torture.

He squirmed in his chair and ground his clenched beefy right hand into the palm of his left hand.

Unusual for Omar. He generally blurted out what he thought. Linda studied him more closely. His eyes and lashes were glistening. He’d been crying. Want to talk about it?

Did the autopsy a few days ago. The police withheld the info until today because they wanted to get the DNA analyses back on the bit of bone I found that wasn’t charred completely. Thought you should be told.

She stopped adjusting the barrette that held her chestnut-colored hair in a chignon. Oh dear.

Al Diaz.

She felt the last five months disappear. Al Diaz, a slightly paunchy detective in the Albuquerque Police Department, was slouching in the same chair in which Omar now sat. The thirtyish Al was giving her his smart-aleck smile. He and his partner Elsa Grasso were convinced Linda’s examination of scientific misconduct charges against a so-called diet doctor was intertwined with their investigation of two murders in the medical school. They’d been right. Together they had solved the cases in only eighteen days. Dr. Abel Raines had been indicted.

She snapped back to present. She was as good as dead if Raines ever got out of jail. Until this moment, she hadn’t worried, well not much, because of Al’s promise. He’d said his testimony would be strong enough that she wouldn’t have to testify. Now Al was dead and Raines was awaiting trial.

A tear escaped Linda’s left eye. How? I thought Al had transferred from the Homicide Division to some sort of desk job in police administration.

Omar sighed. That was the cover story. When Elsa, instead of Al, became a sergeant in the Homicide Division. He decided he needed a change and went to work for the New Mexico Gangs Task Force. Guess the last time I saw him was before he went undercover about three months ago. He disappeared about two weeks ago.

You must have worked a lot of cases with Al when he was in homicide.

Omar pulled his fingers through the thicket of his short black hair. Yeah, I autopsied a lot of bodies from his cases. One of the few cops who could eat when I showed him photos of the worst details. Real salt of the earth.

After Omar departed, Linda couldn’t focus on the task at hand—strengthening the Pain Management Center in the health center. No wonder, the center was the brainchild of her predecessor Abel Raines.

A large state university can’t excel at everything and so has to prioritize. In some ways Raines was the best at this task. Two years ago while the medical school’s associate dean, Raines convinced not only the school’s physicians, but also nurses, physical therapists, psychologists and others in the university community, that the pain management clinic in the hospital should be expanded into a university-wide center for pain management with clinical and research wings. Then he wheedled state legislators into providing funds for five new faculty positions associated with the center. A real coup. She knew she couldn’t have accomplished the task. Unlike Raines, she didn’t know everyone’s secrets, and more importantly she wasn’t willing to bribe and cudgel others into submitting to her will. Even after months in Raines’s old chair, she was uncomfortable. Unsure of herself.

The head of the Neurology Department had called her twice in the last two days. He was eager to negotiate a startup package for George Kummer, a new assistant professor hired into Neurology with funds from one of the new slots in the Pain Management Center.

Linda had studied Kummer’s requests. He wanted his own lab and at least three hundred thousand dollars for equipment, supplies, and a technician. He’d also requested prepaid access for two years to both a positron emission tomography scanner, better known as a PET scanner, and a functional magnetic resonance imaging scanner, familiarly called an MRI. Reasonable. But she couldn’t decide whether she was amused or annoyed by Kummer’s chutzpah in stipulating his access hours to the big equipment would not be between midnight and six a.m. Research projects were almost always assigned those hours because it was unfair to ask patients to report for clinical care then.

She didn’t know much about these big pieces of equipment, except that they cost hundreds of dollars per minute to use. However, every month the medical journals contained colorful photos showing how the brains of healthy subjects and diseased patients reacted to pain, medications, and even emotions. All were derived with PET scanners in combination with MRIs. The Dean, her boss, liked showy research like this because he believed it would attract grants and patients to the new Pain Management Center and ultimately the medical school.

Kummer didn’t explain his research plan well in his proposal, but she finally summarized it to herself. Certain drugs, namely kappa-opioid antagonists, were more effective at reducing pain in women than men. Kummer assumed this was because women were more hormonal than men. She tried to ignore his sexist comment. Thus, he wanted to test the pain-killing effectiveness of these drugs in men being treated for prostate cancer. She thought it strange that Kummer didn’t seem to realize men with prostate cancer were seldom treated with estrogens any more but rather with androgen suppressing agents.

She felt the tic below her right eye pulsating. She’d seen more promising starts to research programs. The proposal wasn’t innovative and lacked a strong scientific basis. More importantly, his research techniques bothered her. She thought he was planning to induce more pain than necessary in his subjects by injecting a hypertonic saline solution into the calves of their legs, but she was a nephrologist and now an associate dean, not an expert on pain management. She was glad the IRB, the med school committee that protected human subjects, was required to review all proposals before researchers could touch subjects.

A door banged shut, then another. The phones in the outer office of the deans’ suite kept jingling. They were short a secretary and phones rang a long time before being answered. She couldn’t ignore the noise and the habitual aches in her sinuses and hands, which were greater than average today, as she tried to review a second request for startup funds.

Raines had also facilitated the hire of this second assistant professor based in the Department of Cell Biology and Physiology to fill a slot in the Pain Management Center. Thank goodness, it was a stronger request than the one from Neurology. She finally approved it and washed a tablet of ibuprofen down with a swig of diet cola.

The analgesic didn’t seem to help, maybe because she kept remembering Al’s hand on her shoulder and his promise that Raines would get a long sentence. Now everything was changed with Al dead.

She gave up pretending to work and called Elsa Grasso, Al’s former partner, and her sister Sara who lived north of Albuquerque in La Bendita. After retiring from being a professor in epidemiology and statistics, Sara Almquist mainly dabbled in weaving what she called soft sculptures and pampered her dog Bug.

CHAPTER 2: Sara Almquist at home

Sara began Tuesday as she did every day with a thirty-minute walk with Bug. He had pranced past the earth-tone stucco houses with graveled yards in the walled community of La Bendita with his plumed black and white tail neatly tucked over his back. He then picked up the pace when they left La Bendita and entered the bosque, the stand of cottonwoods along the Rio Grande River. Although she considered herself to be in good condition, she had to work to keep up with him.

Afterward they settled down to work in her home office. He sat in front of the window on a teak cart at an arms-length from the computer. Through half closed eyes, he scanned the lavender, sage, and occasional rabbits in their front yard. She placed orders for weaving supplies and scanned her emails.

Most of her emails were routine but one wasn’t. USAID, the federal agency for international development, had asked Larry Lewis, an old friend, to lead a team of scientists into Bolivia to assess child health. Although his first name was Larry, everyone called him Lew. Lew wanted to know whether she would be willing to join his team.

She guessed he was desperate. He started by lauding her work as an epidemiologist evaluating the effectiveness of immunization programs in several foreign countries. She’d done those analyses more than ten years ago. Then he admitted the young epidemiologist on the committee had resigned and the committee was due in Bolivia within the next two months.

USAID wanted the committee to assess the impact of current public health services and health threats on the mortality of children under five in Bolivia in rural areas around Potosí and in the city of La Paz. Lew wrote:

We need to do it right because it will be the first USAID program initiated in Bolivia in several years.

She tried to remember what she’d learned about Bolivia when she vacationed there several years before. Evo Morales, the president of Bolivia, had thrown USAID out in 2013 because he claimed USAID’s crop diversification programs were destabilizing Bolivia and destroying coca production. Of course, that was exactly the intent. Many U.S. congressmen thought a good way to reduce cocaine availability in the U.S. was to cut production of coca in Bolivia. However, Evo Morales was an alleged coca farmer with anti-U.S. sympathies.

She guessed Lew hadn’t told her the whole story. Health threats could be interpreted many ways, even to include raising and using coca.

She surfed the Web to learn more. The Bolivians called what would be states in the U.S: departments. The La Paz Department included northwestern Bolivia from Lake Titicaca on the border with Peru to the eastern slopes of the Andes at the edge of the Amazon basin. A lot more than the urban area of La Paz. Coca thrived in the lower regions of the Eastern Andes at fifteen hundred to four thousand feet. She figured that was why USAID was interested in the Department of La Paz.

The selection of the Potosí Department didn’t make sense politically. The area included arguably the richest silver mines ever and an UNESCO world heritage site, but Potosí was at an altitude of over thirteen thousand feet. Not a good place for growing coca or much else.

She checked health statistics from the World Health Organization on Bolivia. They were consistent with her impressions of Bolivia. She’d been driven across the Altiplano from Lake Titicaca to the city of La Paz and spent a couple of days in La Paz on a bus tour several years ago. The barren, sere land generally looked as friendly as Mars. Life there was tough, very tough. No doubt there were severe public health problems in Bolivia.

She debated whether to accept the assignment. Lew was always interesting. Sorta the Indiana Jones of pediatricians with Albert Einstein hair. She had known him for years.

She fondled Bug as she often did when making decisions. He silently allowed her to massage his back and fluttered his eyelashes when she hit the right spot on his back.

The phone rang. Do you remember the detectives I worked with after the murders in the med school five months ago?

Sara was afraid to hear what Linda would say next. Her voice was hoarse, probably from crying. Yeah, the Mutt and Jeff team of Elsa and the heavy one. I don’t remember his name.

He wasn’t that heavy. Well, Al’s dead.

How?

"Have you looked at today’s Albuquerque Journal yet?"

No.

They found his burned body on the mesa. I talked to Elsa. Seemed to think it was a gang execution.

Why?

He’d been working on the New Mexico Gangs Task Force and the way the body was burned.

She listened as Linda recounted the grisly details.

Sometimes I think the good guys never win. He… he… deserved better. Linda sobbed loudly.

Yeah. She waited for Linda’s sobs to subside. Any happier news?

Linda sighed. I created startup packages for two assistant professors. Funny how some are hard to like even on paper.

What do you mean?

Got one from an assistant professor in the Department of Cell Biology and Physiology named Diego Rivera.

Related to the Mexican muralist?

No, well I don’t know. Anyway, he has great ideas and made reasonable requests for funds to get his research going. And I got one from an assistant professor named George Kummer in Neurology. His ideas are only okay at best, and his startup proposal was more of a dare than a request. Nothing will be enough to please him.

Think you read too much into the writings of nervous, maybe inept, assistant professors. Could even be a difference in their department heads.

Don’t think so. The head of the Department of Neurology seemed mystified by his new assistant professor’s attitude. Well, better get going.

Sara decided not to mention her potential trip to Bolivia. No need to rile Linda. See ya.

She pulled a file from her travels in Bolivia. Lots of postcards, several maps, and the envelope for a tea bag spilled out on the floor. She fingered the small lime green envelope, which was labeled: El mate del al Familia Boliviana and Coca. The coca tea bags had been as plentiful as regular tea bags in hotel restaurants. She had pitched the contents of the tea bag rather than risk it being seized by U.S. Customs but had kept the package as a memento. She replied to Lew’s email.

***

Bug glided into the kitchen and sat at her feet as soon as she began to poke through the plastic tubs of leftovers in her refrigerator. His brown eyes remained focused on her as she placed an open-faced cheese sandwich in the broiler, rummaged through newspapers stacked on the kitchen island, and scanned