Murder-Minded : Crime writer Patricia Cornwell isn’t afraid to tackle the grisly. Her newest is ‘Cause of Death.’

In the Richmond morgue, Patricia Cornwell is alive.

It’s a busy Monday in early May, and there are a 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 seven 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 $24 million and $3 million more for British rights. Her newest Scarpetta novel, “Cause of Death,” is out. She writes so fast, she’s launching another series about a police officer 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 the Rev. 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, and to this day, Patricia Cornwell carries a leather-bound journal just about everywhere.

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.

*

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-vrr-ing 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 woman, now single, with 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.

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.

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.”

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.”

She has the instincts of a journalist because she was one. Newly married in 1979, she went to work for the Charlotte Observer. Her first job was piecing together the TV listings. Then she became a police-beat reporter.

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 comes 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.

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.

As for her two rings, one is a signet ring with the Scarpetta crest--a design by an FBI friend that incorporates a microscope, the caduceus symbol of the medical profession, a toe tag, a syringe and a woman’s shoe. (In Italian, “scarpetta” means “little shoe.”) The other is a simple gold band.

It’s not a wedding ring, exactly, but it’s close. Cornwell bought it in Verona, Italy, the home of Kay Scarpetta. “This doesn’t mean I’m married to my character,” she says. “But I value this thing I do. It’s about commitment.”

Commitment to her work and to her readers.

“I owe it to them and to myself to never flag,” she says. “The ring is a reminder that whenever I start feeling lazy, I need to get my butt out there.”

*

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.”

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 says.