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DEATH BECOMES HER

Patricia Cornwell is one of the highest-paid female writers in the world. She makes as much as $8 million for each of her chilling crime novels featuring medical examiner Kay Scarpetta, and Unnatural Exposure, due out this July, is expected to rocket like her previous books to the top of the best-seller lists. But, as Cornwell reveals to JUDY BACHRACH, her personal life is as dark as her novels; twisted tale of betrayal, pain, and attempted murder

JUDY BACHRACH

To give you a fair idea of how important Patricia Cornwell is in the publishing world—the awe, frenzy, adulation, and fury the mere mention of her name unleashes—here is a sample of the rat-a-tat-tat shelling I get from Putnam's publicity department when I phone requesting an interview with Cornwell's publisher, Phyllis Grann: "What questions are you intending to ask? Well, Phyllis will want to know. Who are the people you have spoken to about Cornwell? Why are you doing this story?"

Astonishing timorousness in an age when most authors and publishing houses are desperate for coverage. But there is ample reason for the inquisition. Cornwell is a big Putnam plum—even juicier in a way than Tom Clancy, king of the techno-thriller, especially when you consider that she hammers out her usually literate bestsellers in less than a year. Three books have leapt almost immediately to the very top of the New York Times bestseller list. Unnatural Exposure, her eighth novel featuring Kay Scarpetta, a brilliant, awesomely controlled medical examiner who is more comfortable with guns and gruesome murders than intimacy, has a first printing of more than one million copies. The book is being published in July.

Some of bookselling's biggest numbers are now generated by tales of solitary crime fighters numbed and alienated by the bloody horrors they have witnessed. This is Cornwell's haunting territory. Nine books have appeared since 1988, when she completed Postmortem, an excellent fictional account of a string of actual murders that claimed the lives of several women in Richmond, Virginia. It won every major crime-novel award in the country. Since then the author's career has turned into a wild conflagration of triumph, money, and talent. More recently, the blaze has been fueled by explosions of controversy and scandal.

Putnam bagged Cornwell just three years ago when she dumped Scribner, the publisher that had built her career, in a snit, phoning Grann at home on a Sunday. "I really feel awkward about this; I know I shouldn't be doing this" is how the unrepentant Cornwell describes her opening gambit to the steely Grann, who is expert at extending the careers of "name-brand" writers.

Cornwell's sixth Scarpetta book, From Potter's Field, had not received—its author strenuously felt—the marketing and publicity attention it deserved from Scribner when it was published in 1992. "I was the biggest author in that house and that's not a good place to be, because people can't really grow to accommodate you," Cornwell says. "You don't send someone like me on a 30-city book tour. And send them to a warehouse to sign books for a distribution thing. I mean, come on!"

Putnam offered Cornwell $24 million for a three-book deal and $3 million for a one-book deal, making her one of the highest-paid female novelists in history. She was accorded full star treatment. She signed with powerhouse International Creative Management agent Esther Newburg, jettisoning Michael Congdon, who edited some of Cornwell's early (and best) work himself. And then the writer's name began popping up in decidedly unliterary circles.

Almost one year ago, a former undercover F.B.I. agent named Eugene Bennett, who lived in Virginia, lured his estranged wife, Margo, a neat, compact blonde, to a nearby Manassas church by threatening to blow its minister up. Margo, also an F.B.I. agent, came to the church armed, she would later testify, because she knew full well that one day or other her husband would try to murder her. Holding a gun, Gene threw a sack over the poor minister's head and then fled after Margo took a shot at her husband. Why? One powerful motive behind such behavior became apparent after the man's arrest when his divorce papers fell into the hands of a Washington, D.C., radio station. They contained these phrases: "Mrs. Bennett met and became totally infatuated with Ms. Cornwell." The husband had "observed Mrs. Bennett and Ms. Cornwell hugging and kissing."

Gene Bennett's allegations were given a lighthearted brush-off by Cornwell, who has always been reticent to discuss her sexual identity. "I wish all of it were true," she told the London Sunday Times last year, "because maybe then my life would be more interesting." As it turned out, however, all of it was true. In fact, in February of this year, Gene Bennett was convicted on charges he had tried to murder his unfaithful wife. The jury recommended a 61-year prison sentence.

'It wasn't even two trips over the rug, as we say here!" cries Cornwell in her Richmond offlee. She is referring, I assume, to the number of times she made love to Margo BenAfter a year of determined efforts to hide the truth about herself and her lesbian affair, about herself and everything, she tells me: "I'm gonna go for broke with you."

"It was very brief in every way you can imagine!" she says of the affair, which lasted from 1991 to 1992. "It was all about giving comfort to someone. And it was about her neediness and my own deprivation. And that's how this sort of thing happens." A pleasant drawl tugs at Cornwell's vowels, but her tone is pleading.

"It was so stupid of me! So reckless. I mean, here she was, a married woman! With two children!" A pause. "This whole thing with Margo—Margo and I just didn't know each other that well."

At her husband's trial for attempted murder, Margo also seemed inclined to stress the fleeting nature of her affair with the crime novelist. They had "intimate contact" on only two occasions, Margo testified, a blue skirt skimming the tops of a pair of eloquently muscled legs. "I didn't have a relationship." But this distinction may be a product of hindsight. Dot Jackson, a longtime North Carolina journalist who was for years perhaps Cornwell's closest friend, is far from believing it was an incidental interlude on Patricia's side. In fact, Jackson can't understand why none of the lawyers in the case ever called her or other Cornwell confidants.

"I told Margo if she didn't g et away he would p bably kill her," says Cornwell.

"Why were none of us subpoenaed to this trial?" she wonders. "Well, I could have said that I knew that it was an obsessive relationship." Cornwell, Jackson recalls, "called any hour of the night to tell me further developments," and there was much talk about Gene. " 'Oh, that man is terrible. I've got to get her away from him'" is what she remembers Patsy confiding. "This was just a constant thing."

You gave Margo Bennett expensive gifts the year you were together, I remind Cornwell. A costly blouse. A Mont Blanc pen. The brand merits special mention since a Mont Blanc gets a cameo role in From Potter's Field, in which Scarpetta watches her lover, a married F.B.I. agent, "running his tapered fingers" over the pen.

"Mont Blanc!" Cornwell barks out a derisory laugh. "I'd give you a Mont Blanc if you weren't a journalist!" The pens, which range in price from $155 to $10,000, could once be purchased for $60 at the F.B.I. PX at Quantico, Cornwell informs me. And she should know: she has been granted unparalleled access to the F.B.I. training grounds in order to research her gritty, impressively detailed novels. In fact, it was in 1991, while attending a deathinvestigation school at the F.B.I.'s academy, that Cornwell, already gaining acclaim for her first novel, met Margo, an agent who taught communications there.

Shortly thereafter, she also met Gene Bennett. "My first vision of him was him standing out on his porch wearing night-vision goggles," Cornwell says. She considered him distinctly odd.

Gene reviled his wife, using what Cornwell terms "degrading, abusive" language. "He sat in my house using the f-word. He talked about women using the c-word."

As 1992 progressed, the writer commented more and more often to close friends on Margo's miserable choice of spouse. "He was rough and coarse and a son-of-a-bitch and 'I'm afraid for her'" is how Dot Jackson recalls Patsy Cornwell's late-night rants. "She at one point was going to get a place for [Margo] and take her away with the children."

Cornwell denies hatching such an escape plan, but does acknowledge "giving counsel" to her lover, adding, "If I broke up their marriage it was only because at one point I told her if she didn't get away from him he would probably kill her."

Throughout this period, Cornwell confided to friends, Gene was trying to pick up extra income by selling gold jewelry on the side. Given Cornwell's opinion of Gene and her growing intimacy with his wife, it is all the more astonishing that she showed no hesitation about buying a chain bracelet and other trinkets from the undercover agent. (He was, Cornwell boasted to her friends, selling them very cheap.) "He showed me one night. He tore me away from Margo and tried to get me to buy things from him," she says now.

Tony Daniels, a dear friend of Cornwell's who was until recently an assistant director of the F.B.I. in charge of Quantico, appears genuinely taken aback by the allegations of Gene Bennett's moonlighting as a jewelry salesman, which is against F.B.I. regulations. "I mean," he says flatly, "you could be fired, or more likely demoted in grade."

But Cornwell—who writes with authority about bureau mores in her novels, and who took many of its training programs and completed the fabled Yellow Brick Road endurance course—says she was not aware of how the F.B.I. viewed such transactions.

"Remember, this was 1992," Cornwell explains. "I was still getting started. I would have no reason to ever imagine that an F.B.I. agent would be bad. So I got a few things from him." A sly grin. "Let's put it this way: he couldn't afford to sell the stuff I like now!"

On Labor Day 1992, Gene Bennett came home to find the quiet wreckage of his middle-class suburban life. The live-in nanny was removing his two daughters' belongings from the house he and his wife had shared for five years; Margo had secretly leased a nearby town house. A fight ensued, Gene took possession of Margo's F.B.I. revolver, and the next thing he knew, Margo was (to use the defense lawyer's memorable courtroom phrase) "snitching him out" to Tony Daniels, her boss at the F.B.I.: she told Daniels that Gene had cheated the bureau of $17,000 by submitting fraudulent moving expenses in 1987.

"I literally could kill someone and get away with it'' Patricia Cornwell told a friend.

"She told me she could no longer live with a liar and a thief," recalls Daniels. The F.B.I. assistant director was worried for his employee. Had Margo, as Gene's wife and fellow agent, signed some of those fraudulent documents? "It ran through my mind, Well, where the hell were you while all this was playing out?" He stopped her narrative three times, very deliberately, as she sat in his office rattling on about Gene's wrongdoing.

"Margo, you don't want to get into this," he said. But Margo did.

Reid Weingarten, the lawyer who has defended Gene Bennett on both the fraud and attempted-murder charges, believes he knows why Margo was eager to injure her husband: "The essence of the breakup of the marriage and the trigger for the allegation by Margo was the relationship [with Cornwell]," he says, though Margo denied this on the witness stand. When asked if she was the one who told Margo to go to the F.B.I. with those fraud charges, Cornwell replies, "I'm sure when she brought it up, I would have said, 'Absolutely!'"

In 1993, just as Margo was about to testify at Gene's fraud trial, he bound and gagged her, threw her into a van, and injured her with a taser gun. "I think Gene deteriorated before our eyes as underwent this phenomenal pressure he faced at home," says Weingarten. Gene's attorneys deny Margo was kidnapped by her husband. Weingarten adds, "I think Patricia Cornwell lived it with Margo."

Gene went on to serve a traumatic year in jail for defrauding the F.B.I. over the moving expenses. Margo Bennett, her own career destroyed by her accusations against her husband, was kicked out of the F.B.I. Late last year, she declared personal bankruptcy, and the list of the couple's joint liabilities—more than $490,000—is mountainous when compared with the less than $3,000 a month she now receives as a "police administrator" at a local college. Her possessions are spare. Among her declared assets: a 1992 Geo Prizm, four suits, a $100 watch, and a 9-mm. Smith & Wesson semi-automatic.

Around the time the Bennetts' marriage ended, according to both Dot Jackson and another friend, Cornwell experienced an abrupt change of heart toward her lover. "I don't like that woman—she's weak," they recall her saying. "Margo lost her power and therefore her attractiveness for Patsy," says Jackson.

Cornwell denies using the word "weak." But what she does say is enlightening: "I think in any situation like this somebody can gravitate toward you almost more than you are able to handle," she explains. "And when you see how grave everything is, you sometimes might say, 'You know, this is not what's gonna help here.'"

She tries again: "The point of what I am saying: It's not a big deal! These things happen! It's too bad these things had to become public. But that's the price of being a celebrity."

One thing Cornwell does consider a big deal: days after Gene tried to murder Margo, police found his rented red Ford Contour parked in Richmond. Not much was made of this by the prosecutor, and indeed Gene's lawyer insists that his client planned nothing sinister in the area. But the fact remains that Richmond, which happens to be almost 100 miles from the crime scene of Manassas, is also. Cornwell's hometown. "He'd come to Richmond to do that! To hurt me!" The crime novelist is clearly outraged. "It was awful! I remember it vividly. . . . The Feds—nobody seemed to do a thing as far as where I was concerned."

Up on a North Carolina mountain is perhaps the only place where Patsy Cornwell has found succor. Here, Ruth Graham speaks ^ S softly about the childhood of the writer. Like the somber land it surveys, the house is all timber and flagstone, and exudes melancholy. Inside, the touches of vanity are few: a vividly colored portrait of Ruth's husband, the Reverend Billy Graham— which, on close inspection, turns out to be mainland-Chinese embroidery, microscopically stitched—inspects all newcomers. One of Ruth's long, thin wrists is clasped by a stout gold bracelet. "My Protestant rosary," Ruth calls it humorously, for this golden-anniversary gift from Billy is engraved with the names of her five children.

In a corner of the massive living room, Cornwell looks on hungrily, as indeed she has her whole life. She is not Ruth Graham's child. Yet there is a part of her that has clearly always wished she were. "She's like my mother, I love her so much!" Cornwell exclaims at one point. "Again—a very powerful person. I realize that. But kind! Kind and powerful!"

She says this despite the fact that for more than six years, until their reconciliation, she refused to speak to Ruth and Billy Graham—a surprising estrangement, for it is no exaggeration to say that one snowy day long ago Ruth and Billy Graham literally saved the girl then called Patsy Daniels, flinging open the gates to a road that would eventually lead the lonely child to an adult paradise of white limos, costly wines, Learjets, and international acclaim. All the things that, her friends say, have failed to make her happy.

For most of her life, Cornwell, now 40, has been plagued by seemingly unconquerable "dragons," as she calls them—bulimia, anorexia, depression. These, she once believed, were the result of early loss and abandonment. Her father, Sam Daniels, an accomplished lawyer from Miami, left the family on Christmas day when his daughter was five. According to both Patsy and friends, her mother retained hideous memories of the marriage:

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"Patsy's mother said that one morning while the kids were little she was cooking breakfast and got some bacon grease on her hand," remembers Dot Jackson. "She called out. He pulled the skin off her hand and said, 'Go in the bedroom and shut the door until you can behave yourself!' "

Four years after Cornwell's father left, her mother, suffering from the first of her nervous breakdowns, dropped Patsy and her two brothers, unannounced, on the doorstep of the gorgeous timber house fronted by an old spinning wheel—the home of Billy Graham.

And when the massive door opened, there was Ruth Graham—"stunning," recalls Cornwell, and certainly the most important person the child was likely to encounter in the tiny resort town of Montreat, North Carolina. The glamorous older woman was in the midst of lunch, but asked the children in. Young Patsy marveled as Ruth, her twist of brown chignon bowed over a plate, worked strands of spaghetti around so that they formed the name of her son Ned.

Ruth took charge of the distraught children, asking missionary friends to care for them while their mother was in the hospital. To this day, Cornwell recalls the frustration of being sent away from the beautiful and powerful Ruth Graham to live among lesser people in a lesser house.

It is telling that Cornwell has made it her business to fly Chopper, her Boston terrier (who, Cornwell says, has her own frequent-flier miles), and me to the Graham mountaintop in one of the many private jets she charters on a regular basis. She has left behind in Richmond her chief of security and the immensely tall off-duty policeman who follows her in most public places. She is wearing her gold Scarpetta signet ring, her black Scarpetta jacket—items the author had designed specifically to celebrate her fictional heroine. Her face, still raw from cosmetic laser treatments completed 10 months earlier, burns with anticipation and worry. She is clearly not enjoying my interview with Ruth Graham.

Nonetheless, Cornwell gallantly leaves the room when the time comes for me to ask her surrogate mother if she has read the newspaper accounts of Patsy's disastrous affair with a married woman.

"I've read it!" Billy Graham's wife says, stopping me cold. "And the fact that I've known her all these years and not once have I had the slightest—the slightest—clue that there was anything off base there. Never!" Tears fill the old woman's eyes. Most of Patsy's novels, in which a lovely lesbian character (Scarpetta's niece) is quickly assuming prominence, go unread by Ruth.

But she still champions the lost child she sees in Cornwell. Ruth recalls the adult Patsy's attempts to pursue a closer relationship with her father before Sam Daniels died in 1996. Ruth and Billy Graham were at Cornwell's side during a rendezvous in London a few years ago. "I wasn't impressed with him," says Ruth Graham with a flash of anger. "There was something cold! If he went, he probably went because his daughter had become a celebrity. The child was a celebrity! It didn't get to be because of paternal love."

This kind of neglect has its consequences. Much of Cornwell's life has been spent relentlessly chasing love, approval, and perfection, while literally starving herself. In her teens, weighing 89 pounds, she was hospitalized in the same Asheville establishment where her mother had sought treatment for her first breakdown years earlier. Once again, Ruth Graham came to Patsy's rescue. "Want to go have a pizza?" she asked the girl, who was struggling to pursue her college studies.

"She didn't ask any probing questions about what I'd gone through. She was just there," says Cornwell. Billy Graham's wife also gave her young friend a beautiful leather-bound book, with firm instructions to start writing.

And that's just what Patsy Cornwell did—although she certainly didn't choose the literary path Ruth might have imagined or desired. After graduating from North Carolina's Davidson College, which she attended on scholarship, and marrying Charles Cornwell, a professor 17 years her senior, Patsy became a crime reporter. Then, when Charles Cornwell left teaching and moved to Richmond to study for the ministry, she took a job as a data processor at the local morgue. There she met Marcella Fierro, a brilliant medical examiner on whom the writer would later base her glorious blonde heroine, Kay Scarpetta.

The middle-aged Fierro is a small, nononsense figure in sensible wool skirts and brilliantly hued blazers, her face framed by a blunt brown bob. She has a husband, grown children, and an aversion to unnecessary drama. In the Richmond morgue, she is the unflappable authority who refers to the heartbreaking rows of tagged and naked bodies as "my patients," But Fierro delights in Cornwell's revisionism, and her own transformation into the gun-toting, fitness-conscious Scarpetta with her terrific aim and disastrous love life. Photos of Demi Moore, pale, dressed in scrubs (the actress actually flew here to research a possible Scarpetta role), dot the morgue desks.

"I think Patsy's given it a little pizzazz," Fierro says, calmly plunging into a plate of smoked pork in the middle of a busy death day. There are 21 patients mutely waiting on refrigerated shelves. "But those guys Scarpetta's in love with are real losers. She should get married."

In describing Cornwell's stint at the morgue, friends remark that, as usual, the ingenue Patsy was fiercely focused on her latest obsession. "Everything was Marcella. Well, one time it was because Patsy sent Marcella a Christmas card and Marcella put it on the wall with all the other Christmas cards," reports Dot Jackson, who was on the receiving end of "hysterical" Cornwellian phone calls. "Patsy thought her card should be in a special place. And Marcella was 'Well, what's the matter with you?' "

Fierro, who says she doesn't remember the incident, comments mildly, "Patsy's very emotional."

Cornwell has always been tireless, unwavering in the heat and focus of her ardor. This helps explain her literary production: "The best I did was write 200 pages in 10 days," she tells me. "Next morning I woke up, my left hand was paralyzed for four months. Radial-nerve damage. But I wasn't unbalanced. I was just manic like an artist gets manic."

So this hot-eyed pursuit of whatever it is Cornwell desires, while effective, usually has decidedly mixed results. Witness her marriage to Charles Cornwell, who is now a minister at First Scots Presbyterian Church in Charleston and firmly refuses to talk about his former wife. When Patsy first saw him, he taught English.

"I told Patsy, 'Charlie's never going to date a student,' " says Davidson professor Tony Abbott, who has remained friends with them both. "And he didn't."

Undeterred, Patsy left bottles of wine on Charles's doorstep. Meanwhile, she waitressed, worked part-time at The Charlotte Observer, wrote a novel (unpublished) in her senior year—and graduated. Finally, after she returned to his doorstep with yet another gift, Charles Cornwell relented and shed his lifelong bachelorhood. "He didn't have anything to say about it," Cornwell would later recall.

Like Ruth Graham, who didn't think Fierro's morgue was "a healthy place" for Patsy, Charles thought perhaps it was time for his wife to leave—not merely the morgue but Richmond as well. One day the phone rang and his young wife, then finishing Postmortem, found herself talking to the minister of a Dallas congregation. He was inquiring as to how soon she might accompany her husband to Texas if he were to secure a position there.

"Oh, could be about six months or so," Cornwell said.

"Ohhhh. That would begin to cause speculation among the parishioners."

"You know," Patsy Cornwell told her caller, "I am not the prize in the Cracker Jack box!"

"And what does that say? That you don't want to leave the morgue for the church?" she asks me, laughing outright. "I don't know. But I didn't. Very shortly after that Charles announced he wanted a divorce. That was in 1988."

Cornwell is small and pretty in a structured, boyish way, with ice-blue eyes, a square jaw, and, of late, more than a passing resemblance in both face and mannerisms to her idol, Jodie Foster. The writer's straight hair is artfully streaked, her nose relieved by surgery of its original bump, her breasts, first enhanced—"Yes, that time was for my husband," she concedes—and then, after complications, reduced a total of four times. (On the last surgical table, Cornwell recounts dramatically, she "lost two units of blood.")

As a young reporter, Cornwell says, she was raped by someone in law enforcement whom she refuses to name even now. "He was a whole lot more powerful than I was. Let's put it that way," she says. But, Cornwell's friends claim, she was truly fearful of only two things: death and lesbians. "I was definitely homophobic in the early years," Cornwell agrees. "I think you're scared of what you're threatened by. Because—you know—it may be something you're attracted to. But, see, I understand that now."

And as for death: after confronting that demon in the Richmond morgue, Patsy Cornwell informed a friend that she had learned so much about murder that she could be "very dangerous if I ever went over the edge. I literally could kill someone and get away with it."

Healthy or not, her work at the morgue eventually paid off—although not at all handsomely at first. Postmortem got the author just $6,000—and the satisfaction of appearing in print after five rejections. It also got instant recognition. Her second novel, Body of Evidence, was even better written. "It's what really launched her," says Michael Congdon, her agent at the time. "Plus the fact that Patsy is an excellent promoter. When she was going out on the road she would do whatever was asked of her to promote the books."

And then some. After Postmortem appeared, Dot Jackson's grown son committed suicide. Cornwell flew to South Carolina to console her close friend. Jackson recalls that Cornwell brought along "a whole bunch of posters that she wanted to put in bookstores all over the western Carolinas. And they weren't very attractive posters, either, from my point of view. Pictures of dead hands." She shudders, then adds, "She wanted to know a whole bunch of things about the condition of the body and all like that. Yes she did! Yes she did."

"My God! Who would say such an evil thing?" cries Patsy Cornwell, denying that she asked such indelicate questions. She does not attempt to contain her reaction. "Well, she is evil to me," Cornwell emphasizes. The novelist then mentions another former close friend in terms equally severe. The list goes on. Throughout our days together, she will recall with disfavor an ex-chauffeur; another former employee; a psychic in Atlanta "who takes notes"; the psychic's daughter, who sued Cornwell last year for sexual harassment (the suit was dismissed); the actress Demi Moore; Moore's husband, Bruce Willis, "who walked across a table that had food on it"; a publicist; and a potential coauthor.

She also reluctantly discusses her lengthy rift with Ruth Graham over the biography of Ruth that Cornwell wrote in 1983: "We fought like cats and dogs," she says. Ruth evidently didn't want other people's lives discussed in the book; Harper & Row got involved; Patsy got herself a lawyer. "You love and love and do for these people," she would confide to friends during her rupture with the Grahams and others in Montreat. "They don't really know you exist."

So many people, for one reason or another, have earned the writer's reproach. "When I worked with her, she was constantly firing assistants and people who worked with her," says one publishing source.

"Honi soit qui mal y pense, " says Patsy. "I'm heartbroken that people I love and that I'm extremely good to betray me. And then I lose another friend. So it's really my loss more than their loss."

"Betrayal, yes. Terrible betrayals," says Cornwell of the tangled circuitry of her life. We are in her hotel room on Central Park West. Out in the hallway, the soft carpet muffles the footfalls of the tall off-duty policeman in her employ. "It is bizarre! I don't know what it is about my Karma. Someone said to me not so long ago, 'What is it about you that draws all this stuff to you!' And I don't know. I don't know."

Two of those who have tangled with the Cornwell Karma are Helen and Bob Ressler. Bob was a prominent F.B.I. behavioral scientist with (as he would be the first to admit) "tremendous visibility" who had conducted prison interviews with the likes of Sirhan Sirhan, the Son of Sam, John Wayne Gacy, and Charles Manson. In 1990 St. Martin's Press suggested a young woman named Patsy Cornwell to help him write up his life's work for popular consumption.

One of the first things that struck the Resslers about Cornwell was how she spoke of those she had loved. "She denigrated her ex-husband, the minister," says Helen. "She says, 'I was raised by my mother, who was in and out of institutions.'" She also told the couple about the Ruth Graham biography debacle.

After Ressler and his co-author had met about five times, each decided the other was an unworthy partner. Cornwell soured on the project because, as she would write Ressler, "most of what I have looked at to date has appeared before in print." She was, she said, deeply unimpressed by such old-hat "secondary information sources" and wanted "primary sources."

So it is all the more surprising, given Cornwell's disdain for his dull material, that the Justice Department sued Ressler in 1995, claiming he had disclosed secret F.B.I. data to, among others, Patricia Cornwell—an allegation he strenuously denies. To this day, Cornwell insists that Ressler had spirited away secret documents on the nation's most vicious killers: "I was telling everybody, 'Excuse me, this is illegal!'" she says.

"That is just a lie—we know Ressler didn't violate anything," says Ruth Cavin, his St. Martin's editor. "You can quote me: I think [Cornwell] is paranoid."

Ressler and the F.B.I. settled out of court, and he claims he never had to forfeit any of the profits from his books. But his reputation was grievously injured. "I went out of the F.B.I. with a 20-year excellent record and this woman trashed my life," he says. The former F.B.I. agent goes upstairs to fetch another document; with her husband out of earshot, Helen Ressler begins to weep uncontrollably. "I'm sorry, I'm sorry" is about all she can say. "I know I shouldn't get so emotional. But all those years!"

More and more, it seemed, as Patsy Cornwell's career accelerated, many of those around her suffered. She pushed (unsuccessfully, as it turned out) for the removal of the head of the scholarship program at Davidson College, to which she donates an annual $80,000 for writing scholarships ("Think about it! I'm the one puttin' forth the money"); she requested the erasure of an old friend's name from a co-authored TV-show treatment.

While she was on one of her early book tours, she became so displeased with a publicist named Diane Mancher that she had her privately investigated. Mancher's offense, after a tipsy evening at the Beverly Hills Hotel's Polo Lounge, was to toss a Cornwell galley across the room of the hotel bungalow, where it landed near the fireplace. "Patsy said she feared for her life," says Mancher, still amazed.

"I did hire a private investigator, which I would not hesitate to use again—and do use now!" says Cornwell. "This person knew where I lived! She was violent that night!"

By 1992 the author certainly was amassing enough disposable income to do as she wished. Scribner gave her a $700,000 advance for two books: All That Remains and Cruel and Unusual. Chump change, in retrospect. After she defected to Putnam, her British rights alone were sold to Little, Brown for more than $6 million.

Recognizing, as a former reporter, that the selling of fiction demands a lot more than good prose, Cornwell gave the press just what both parties needed— herself, writ large. Seemingly nothing was hidden from public scrutiny: reporters saw her closets, bulging with Escada designs; her garage, with its $80,000 Mercedes. Even her arsenal made great copy. Articles mentioned her desk with its cocked 9-mm. pistol! And look, spilling from her bag, a .357 Colt Python, a .380 Walther semi-automatic, and a .38 Smith & Wesson! The gorgeous Kay Scarpetta, with her Glock 9-mm. and her Mercedes 500E, had nothing on her creator.

Cornwell's friendships were just as ostentatious. Demi Moore came to visit. Orrin Hatch, the ultra-conservative senator from Utah, became such a dear friend that—according to Cornwell—his wife grew mildly jealous. (Few of the writer's friends put much stock in this assertion.) "Let me put it this way," Cornwell tells me, "I would not blame her for not feeling comfortable with someone like me being her husband's friend. . . . But both he and I try to be sensitive about it."

Despite her passion for coverage, the dark side of fame is still plaguing Cornwell. There is in her an immovable assumption that her path is strewn with would-be assassins. Pat Eisemann, Scribner's publicist, vividly recalls the author's security staff during book signings: "They would all talk into their shirt cuffs while we were in this New York bookstore. You're looking around at these middleclass housewives, saying, 'What's gonna happen? They're gonna hit her on the head with a salami?' "

As Cornwell's books gained huge audiences, Hollywood stars including Michelle Pfeiffer and Susan Sarandon expressed their interest in playing Kay Scarpetta. In 1992, Cornwell moved to California to write a screenplay that—she devoutly hoped—would snag the interest of the one actress she had long desired as the embodiment of her heroine: Jodie Foster.

Determined as ever in her quest, she also sought out Foster's childhood tutor, Irene Brafstein. "Oh yes, she was interested in Jodie—she made no bones about it," says Brafstein, who is still close to Cornwell. "She went on to say how wonderful [Jodie] would be for the part—almost like she was giving Jodie a gift: Kay Scarpetta." But the tutor informed her new friend that star introductions were out of the question, "and that was it!"

Cornwell's well-connected California agent dutifully set up the meeting after Brafstein refused to play go-between. But Foster was unwilling to repeat the experience of The Silence of the Lambs. To quote one old Cornwell friend, the star "blew her off' in an unceremonious encounter at a coffee shop. The novelist, enraged yet tantalized by her dismissal, was still not wholly deterred.

"Everything was about Jodie Foster," says Pat Eisemann. "Whatever Jodie didn't do, Patsy didn't." Eisemann felt her client had been unduly affected by Hollywood. "She wanted to know if she could have klieg lights at a book signing. I said, 'Patsy—it just doesn't work like that.' She didn't want to do pre-interviews for the morning shows. Arnold Schwarzenegger does pre-interviews."

In December 1993, when Foster's tutor lay critically ill at a Los Angeles hospital, Cornwell dropped by frequently. "But when she didn't ever see Jodie, she became convinced there was a conspiracy," recalls one observer, "that the nurses were in a plot to keep her from seeing Jodie."

"Give me some credit—I don't have to do that with people!" protests Cornwell. "Do I look like the Birdman of Alcatraz? Or Quasimodo? I mean, that's crazy."

But she also says, "I tell you something. I don't really care about major movie stars. You don't even want to know how much I don't care. It's a bunch of bullshit! And I expect one artist to respect another. And if I don't get that, baby, I'm outta here."

Behind such bitterness is not just the lack of interest of Jodie Foster but also the subsequent defection of Demi Moore. Despite all Moore's initial enthusiasm for the role of Scarpetta, when Cornwell refused to show the actress her screenplay before giving it to her agent, Demi bowed out. "Then it's like the courtship's over!" Patsy cries. And this, as Cornwell tells it, was after the two women had experienced some unique bonding moments: "We sat in hot tubs and smoked cigars together."

To date, although Universal has the rights to From Potter's Field, no Scarpetta movie has ever been filmed. "I'm a very idealistic person, I have very high principles," Cornwell says. Hollywood, as the author informed her hometown Woman's Club, is a very superficial place indeed.

In fact, she recalls her California days with serious displeasure. "I kept thinking, You know something's wrong with this picture!" she says. "I'm supposed to feel good at this stage of my life. But I don't."

Driving drunk in Malibu on the night of January 10, 1993, Cornwell flipped a rented Mercedes three times, wrecking it so thoroughly that she caused more than $26,000 worth of damage and ended up in the hospital with a concussion. She was ordered to spend 36 hours at Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, her driving privileges were restricted for 90 days, and she was put on probation for three years.

"That's one of the darker spots of my life," says the writer, who committed herself to a rehabilitation institution for a month. "I do think the stress of fame didn't help." She didn't stay away from alcohol for too long, however, preferring in those days to stay away from the wheel instead.

"Patsy used to drive up here in a white limousine," reports her old professor Tony Abbott of sleepy Davidson College. Trailing behind Abbott's car as he took his former student to dinner would be Cornwell's security detail muttering softly into walkie-talkies. Students and faculty alike marveled at the woman who had suddenly supplanted the tragic White House aide Vince Foster as the college's most famous graduate.

Unnatural Exposure, says Putnam's Phyllis Grann, who wishes to dispel the general impression that Cornwell is writing less interesting books these days, "is probably Patsy's best Scarpetta to date." In it, Cornwell takes the reader much deeper into Scarpetta's tortuous affair with that married F.B.I. agent. What's more, the publisher adds, Putnam is also expecting from Cornwell a novel (in 1998) about two women at the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (A.T.F.), one of whom has a father who makes moonshine; two more Scarpetta books (in '98 and '99); and a probable sequel to Hornet's Nest, a non-Scarpetta satire that emerged this year to uniformly horrible reviews—but soared nonetheless to the top of the best-seller list.

Besides all that, according to agent Esther Newburg, Patsy has sold a treatment of her A.T.F. story to ABC for a possible series (which Helen Mirren has already turned down) and has revised her Ruth Graham biography for re-release.

Isn't that an awfully heavy load for such a fragile person? I ask Newburg.

"She's not fragile, as a matter of fact. She has an enormous capacity to do all this."

Cornwell would be the first to agree with this new diagnosis. Around three years ago, she says, she discovered she was manic-depressive, a condition she now controls with lithium. Her bulimia and anorexia, which have plagued her "on and off" all these years, her extravagant spending sprees, and her excessive drinking—all were conquered, says the writer, once she was finally medicated correctly. Her impulsiveness is under control, too. "I've seen her offer scholarships to people who were nice to her," reports Brafstein. "It was like she was a child."

On a warm Richmond morning, we walk toward Cornwell's new van. Chris Bailor, her chief of security, presses a remote control and—whammo!—five feet away the engine starts to purr. This, I am told, is just in case a quick getaway becomes imperative for its owner.

"Patsy," I say, "what possessed someone as fearful of violent ends as you to carry on the way you did with the wife of a man who was so clearly out of control?"

"I'll tell you what it's like," she says. "Most women are so close and affectionate and they confide so much I think it's easy to stray just a little beyond the boundaries. And then you say, 'Uh-oh. Enough.'" She smiles. "But that comes from naivete, that situation. I was naive." Another smile. "It was just being kind of innocent."

Naive. Innocent. I am thinking of a call I got from Patsy's close friend Tony Daniels, the former head of Quantico, one Saturday right after Margo testified that she and Patsy had indeed been lovers: "Do you think it's true?" Daniels asks me. He is floored, patently devastated. "Not that I feel betrayed! But I feel like a yo-yo. Everyone said, 'You can't trust Gene Bennett.''"

As it happens, a number of Cornwell's friends and associates feel like yo-yos. "She's either become Scarpetta or Scarpetta's become her—and it's sad. Patsy can travel on the Concorde—she's been all over the world—and have places in Malibu and London. But I don't think she's getting any pleasure," says one in disgust. Who exactly is Patsy Cornwell today? Who, for that matter, is Kay Scarpetta, who appears—as Cornwell's novels grow more and more numerous and less and less eloquent—to possess almost supernatural mental and physical powers? "Patsy's got everything she wanted," says Dot Jackson. "I knew her when all she wanted was Charlie Cornwell and to write novels. Well, none of it has made her happy."

One part of Cornwell, however, has been honed and perfected over the years: the ability to calculate, to size up in a few minutes exactly what people need from her. She tells me, for instance, of the way she collaborated with The Washington Post when the paper wanted to do a profile of her. Now it's my turn to hear the list of treats she can offer a journalist: Would I like a helicopter ride? A visit to the morgue? These are but a few of the rewards she can offer.

"So let me just tell you one thing before you go that is sort of my little rule," she says at the end of our first meeting.

"If you're fair with me, not only will you be amazed at what I'll let you do, and what I'll talk to you about, and you'll get something other people haven't, but you'll have an ally for a long, long time. I mean, if you need to call me, something comes up, and you're the only one who can get through to me, I'll talk to you!"

It appears that I have, after all, just been offered a Mont Blanc pen.