ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Tuesday, June 4, 1996 TAG: 9606040027
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: LINTON WEEKS THE WASHINGTON POST
In the Richmond morgue, Patricia Cornwell is alive.
It's a busy Monday in early May. There are one dozen bodies to be examined.
Cornwell smiles as her former supervisor and old friend Marcella Fierro, the chief medical examiner of Virginia, takes the gift from the box.
It's an autopsy saw. A gray $800 Stryker that looks like a hand-held mixer with a crescent-shaped blade on the end.
Fierro, a sturdy chain-smoker with short dark hair and soft features, has been performing autopsies for 23 years. She smiles. ``Thank you, Patsy.''
Swiveling her wrist, Fierro demonstrates how the blade can easily slice through human muscle and bone. She explains that the saw doesn't work too well on flesh, which is supple and forgiving.
``It's no good in the kitchen,'' she says. They laugh.
This is the world of Patricia Cornwell. It's a dangerous, sinister swirl of innocent victims, murderous monsters, decomposed corpses, unflagging forensic explorers and fanatical law enforcement officers who crave justice.
Where others might feel queasy, Cornwell is at home. Through her love of science and sensibility, she has developed a way to deal with depression, chaos and violence and to make millions of dollars in the process.
The author of six crime novels featuring medical examiner Kay Scarpetta, Cornwell is at the top of her game. Her books have been published in 24 countries and have sold millions of copies worldwide. Cornwell Enterprises has offices in Richmond and Los Angeles where a staff of eight people oversees nearly every aspect of the author's life, from her personal needs - travel arrangements, bottles of Evian, cases of nutritional drink powder - to the creative content of all book covers and advertising, to negotiations for feature films.
In March she signed a three-book contract with G.P. Putnam's Sons for a staggering $24 million and another $3 million for British rights. Her seventh Scarpetta novel, ``Cause of Death,'' will be published in July and will probably debut at No.1 on the best-seller lists, as did her last novel, ``From Potter's Field.'' She writes so fast, she's launching another series about a policeman and a newspaper reporter. The first of those, called ``Hornet's Nest,'' will be out in February.
On the face of it, Cornwell is flying high. But, as in one of her novels, the more you dig, the more you discover. A forensic foray into Cornwell's past reveals a fascinating life, a complicated person and a lesson in law and order. It may also explain her quirky habits, her lavish lifestyle and her attraction to some really morbid things.
The examination begins, oddly enough, in the Rotunda of the U.S. Capitol, where more than 600 people have gathered to pay tribute to Billy Graham and his wife, Ruth. It is the National Day of Prayer and the Grahams are receiving the Congressional Gold Medal. It's an unabashed blending of church and state.
Turning the lectern into a pulpit, Graham preaches a stemwinder about human evil, random violence and motiveless malevolence.
The rapt congregation includes a large smattering of politicos - Bob Dole, Orrin Hatch, Chuck Robb. Paul Harvey is here. So are Pat Boone, Frank and Kathie Lee Gifford and other Christian celebrities.
On the row just behind the Graham family sits Patricia Daniels Cornwell.
Divorced, female, 39. Short brown hair. Penetrating blue eyes. Slim. Not tall. Two gold rings - signet and simple band - on left ring finger. Dark jacket, shirt and pants. Armani shoes. Gold cross on chain around her neck. Green leather-bound notebook in her hand.
Born in Miami to Sam Daniels, an appellate attorney, and Marilyn ``Pat'' Daniels, a secretary. Parents divorced. Mother and three children - Patsy and her two brothers - moved to Montreat, N.C., when she was 7. They lived two miles down the road from Billy and Ruth Graham.
When her mother was wrestling with clinical depression, Patsy and her brothers were farmed out to another family, missionaries back from the Congo.
``She was spunky,'' remembers Ruth Graham. ``She'd go play ball with the boys at the park, then on her way home she'd stop by to see my mother.'' Graham's mother was an invalid and she was impressed that a young girl would take time with a sick, elderly woman.
As a freshman at King College in Tennessee, Patsy Daniels faced despair herself. She suffered from anorexia nervosa and was confined to the same Asheville, N.C., hospital where her mother had been. Soon after she was released, a lonely, confused and vulnerable Daniels went to lunch with Ruth Graham. The evangelist's wife, who had always been impressed by Patsy's creative nature, gave her a leather-bound journal and told her she should start writing.
Patsy Daniels wrote.
To this day, Patricia Cornwell carries a leather-bound journal just about everywhere. She calls her diaries ``research books.'' She has filled 15 or 20 over the years.
After recuperating in Montreat, Patsy Daniels transferred to Davidson College in Davidson, N.C., where she developed a crush on her English professor, Charles Cornwell. He was 17 years her senior. A few days after graduation, she dropped by Cornwell's house and gave him a present. They went to dinner, courted and were married.
The present she gave him, of course, was a leather-bound journal.
At the congressional salute to Billy and Ruth Graham, Patricia Cornwell carries a green leather-bound journal with ``PDC'' in gold on the cover. On this day, it looks for all the world like a Bible.
``I'm concerned about the same things Billy Graham was preaching about - violence. I'm evangelizing too,'' she says as she leaves the reception.
Stepping into the waiting car, she talks about the Graham family. ``I'm stung by their humility. Whether you're a world-famous preacher or a world-famous writer, you should accept that you've been given something you should work very hard to deserve.''
She catches herself. ``That may sound funny coming from someone riding in a limousine.''
Cornwell wrestles with her wealth, with her fame. She apologizes for them every now and then, glories in them at other times.
And now it's another day, a bright May morning, and Cornwell is again carrying one of her research books. She's in the back seat of a Bell Jet Ranger 206B-III helicopter that is vrr-vrr-vrring over Virginia.
She points out her house in the security-gated Richmond community of Lockgreen. She's bought six lots, for extra privacy, in the upper-class subdivision and plans to build a ``fairly large'' house in the future.
She is very security-conscious, she says, because she needs to be. After all, she's an attractive single woman with a wad of money. ``I get a lot of fan mail from inmates who want to meet me when they get out of jail,'' she says.
When she makes public appearances, she uses bodyguards. ``I'm not going to do a book signing with 2,500 people and not have some kind of security,'' she says.
``See that cypress swamp?'' she says. ``That would be a very Gothic place to hide a body.''
Cornwell loves helicopters. They give her an orderly, controlled view of the land below. They give her ideas. They keep her from getting lost - she's notorious among friends and staff for her poor sense of direction. They save time. And she can afford them. Her two-hour flight today will cost about $1,200. She also likes to fly in a larger helicopter that costs five times as much. She goes up one or two times a month, for various reasons.
Off to the left she points to the ``dead fleet,'' a covey of ships that have been mothballed by the Navy. A few minutes later, the helicopter circles some other ships that play a role in ``Cause of Death.''
In the novel, Scarpetta must dive beneath the vessels to find a body. At one point, she runs into a rusty cable that knocks the tank from her back.
To write the scene, Cornwell learned to scuba-dive. She took lessons in San Francisco, went on a 10-day dive in the West Indies, then, with the help of Navy personnel, made the dive in the dark waters off Portsmouth.
Cornwell prides herself on accuracy in her novels. She calls on friends at the police department, at the FBI academy in Quantico and in various Washington agencies to help her get her facts right.
``She's very knowledgeable,'' says former FBI criminal behavior expert John Douglas. ``Her books are very authentic. She really does her homework.''
Even on the spur of the moment. ``After I start writing,'' she says, looking down at the nuclear power plant in Surry, ``I may realize I need to go look at something else. I may need to go to Dublin. Leave tomorrow.''
She has the instincts of a journalist because she was one. Newly married, she went to work for the Charlotte Observer in 1979. Her first job was piecing together the TV listings. Then she became a police-beat reporter.
People who knew her in Charlotte describe her as ambitious and indefatigable. ``She had a lot of energy,'' says Observer Publisher Rolfe Neill. ``We benefited from her talent while she was here.''
Frye Gaillard, the Observer's religion reporter at the time, was bowled over when Cornwell helped him get an interview with Billy Graham.
``When she turned her attention to writing mysteries,'' says Gaillard, now a free-lancer who has just finished a book about Habitat for Humanity, ``it didn't surprise me that she did it well.''
``The downside of the story,'' Gaillard says, is that ``it seems from a distance - that's all I know her from anymore - that fame and riches have been something she's had a little bit of trouble with.''
Several of her old friends say Cornwell ignores them these days.
``If your life changes as much as mine has,'' Cornwell says, ``you lose a lot of people along the way.''
Gaillard says: ``We have no hard feelings toward her. We just worry about her. But I think she's too good a person at heart to get blown away by all the riches and fame.''
When Charles Cornwell decided to leave Davidson and enter Union Theological Seminary in Richmond, Patricia followed.
She wrote a biography of Ruth Graham, ``A Time for Remembering,'' which was published in 1983. A new edition of the book is coming out in August.
But she wanted to be a crime novelist. To gain firsthand experience, she took a job in the Virginia medical examiner's office in 1984.
For six years she worked at the morgue, first as a technical writer, then as a computer analyst. She also volunteered to be a city cop and got her first taste of community policing.
In 1988 she decided she didn't want to be a preacher's wife. She and her husband divorced. In 1990 she published her first Scarpetta novel, ``Postmortem,'' inspired by serial murders in Richmond.
She says she writes her stories the way the medical examiner's office works a case: She starts with a body. ``Then I let the story tell itself.''
Unlike many crime writers, however, Cornwell also has a political agenda. Like Fierro, she's a strong believer in victims' rights and in meting out punishment. ``Oppression and discrimination are wrong,'' she says. ``I get physically angry when I hear about it.''
She rants against inequality. ``Homicide,'' she says, ``is the ultimate abuse of power.''
As a rule, she doesn't read other mystery writers. She reads poetry and crates of research material for her work.
In a way, she is Kay Scarpetta's research assistant. Every venue, every person, every waking hour, even an occasional dreaming hour, is fodder for her fiction.
But her best stories still come from the morgue.
``You start with very little information,'' she says. Then, working with a team of forensic specialists, she says, you can determine when, where and how the person died. And, with a little detective work and experience and imagination, you can figure out why.
``A dead body tells you how a person lived,'' she adds.
LENGTH: Long : 203 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: AP FOR THE WASHINGTON POST 1. ``Homicide,'' saysby CNBPatricia Cornwell, ``is the ultimate abuse of power.'' color.
2. Patricia Cornwell's seventh Kay Scarpetta novel, ``Cause of
Death,'' will be published in July.