She began her career as a police reporter before taking a job in the Chief Medical Examiner's Office in Virginia. There, she spent as much time in the morgue as possible, watching autopsies - including dozens on bodies which had been savagely maimed and mutilated in the course of being murdered. Now she writes crime novels, but Patricia D. Cornwell keeps going back to the morgue to witness the kind of gruesome sights that would give an angel bad dreams. Interview: Liam Fay Pix: Colm Henry