Forensics, Fiction, and the Fine Line Between Them: A Sit Down with Patricia Cornwell

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And I'm Elena.

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Let's go!

Hey, weirdos, I'm Ash.

And I'm Elena.

And this is a very special episode of Morbid.

We got so excited during this interview that we forgot to ask our guests to do the end.

I am, because it was Patricia Cornwell.

What the fuck?

I am.

So, this interview was wild.

It was so cool.

I was floating above us all during this.

I wish that you guys,

we do have sub-video for me.

We do, so I think we'll be able to post some stuff.

Yeah.

Elena was literally like

floating.

Yeah, I was beaming.

Elena has always been a huge fan of Patricia Cornwell.

So just, it was really cool.

I just wanted to like sit back and watch it for the most part.

I was like, I had a couple questions in there that I ended up deleting on our shared doc and just like highlighted and was like, go to this one.

Like, just keep going.

I'm like, you got this.

Go.

It's true.

I have been a huge, I've been a fan of Patricia Cornwell.

I mean, in case you don't know Patricia Cornwell, like, you got to get on it because she's fucking amazing.

Yeah, honey, what are you doing?

She's sold over 120 million books, which is

insane.

She's an author of nearly 50 books.

And a lot of people know her for the Scarpetta series.

There's like almost 30 books in that one.

Wow.

It's an amazing series.

It follows a medical examiner, Kay Scarpetta, who's just, she was my hero growing up.

Like, I wanted to be Kay Scarpetta.

You kind of are.

Honestly, that was the dream.

I fucking love her.

It's, she does like thriller, but it's like really

science-based.

And it's, it's got like a little, some of her books have some horror elements in there.

Like, she's really good at balancing it all.

She even, in one of them, she goes to the actual body farm in the book.

Like, and she went to the body farm.

It's so funny.

It's called the body farm, by the way.

I remember you telling me about that.

Yeah.

And I was like, because I was fascinated by the body farm.

So when that came out, I was like, let's go, girls.

Yeah.

But she's amazing.

I have been reading her books since I was like 13 or 14.

I mean, I started, I think her first book maybe came out in like 1990.

Wow.

I think, which I wasn't reading at that point because I was five.

But I was reading it, you know, 10 years later for sure, like eight years later.

And I've read every single one of them.

I think.

and up to like the last.

I think I've missed the last three.

I have to catch up on them.

Yeah.

But John buys me anytime a new book comes out by Patricia Cornwell.

He knows he's going to run out and grab it and get it for me.

I have to, I have a whole, I mean, I have an almost an entire bookshelf dedicated purely to Patricia Cornwell.

I can attest to that.

She's my girl.

I remember when I was doing, I did a paper on Jack the Ripper in like

freshman year and you gave me Portrait of a Killer tomorrow.

And I, that's a great book.

Yes.

It's so good because when she gets into something,

she fucking gets into it.

She's super, super informative.

And I always loved that about her too.

I always felt like she was like super kindred that way because she seems like someone who just like wants there, and she is.

She like confirmed that for us in the interview.

She is that person that just, when she gets hyper-focused on something, she's just gonna go

down the hole.

And she was so much fun.

You guys are for sure kindred.

There was a connection there.

I love.

I said, I love watching.

I love it.

It was great.

We became best friends during this interview.

We're best use for life for me and Patricia.

Yeah, in about five seconds, you'll hear us both get invited to her home.

Hell yeah.

And I intend to do it.

Patricia, get ready.

See you there, brother.

This interview was awesome.

We hope you guys love it.

It was really interesting.

She's a fascinating lady and just another fucking amazing author that I got to talk to because of you guys.

Hell yeah.

So without further ado, enjoy Patricia Cornwell.

So Patricia, thank you so much for coming on Morbid.

This is massive for me.

I'm freaking out inside.

So Patricia, you worked for the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner for six years in Richmond.

In your early career in the medical examiner's office, what shaped the creation of K-Scarpetta during those years?

Well, let me tell you a little morbid secret.

Oh, I love that.

See, people think that I happened to be working in the medical examiner's office, or shall we just say the morgue,

and that out of that I got ideas for writing books.

That's not at all what happened.

When I graduated from college back in the Stone Age and I was an English major and I knew the only thing I seemed to do halfway decently was writing.

So I managed to get a menial job at the newspaper, the Charlotte Observer.

I worked my way up to being a reporter and they put me on the police beat.

And so that was my first introduction to crime, you know, going to homicide scenes and doing this sort of stuff.

And then at that time,

I was married to my former English professor and he wanted to move to Richmond, Virginia to go to seminary.

And so I had to leave my journalism job.

I won't go into all the boring details, but suffice it to say that at one point I thought to myself, what am I going to do with my life?

And I knew I was interested in crime and I wanted to write books.

So I thought I'd put the two together.

But the one thing I didn't know about is what happens to the body when they whisk it away from the crime scene.

I knew it went to a morgue somewhere.

I knew there were forensic pathologists who looked at the body.

But back in the, this was back in the 1980s.

Back in those days, that kind of information wasn't readily available.

So in Richmond.

I got an appointment to go to the medical examiner's office, and that's where I met Dr.

Marcela Fiero, who was one of the first, I think, five women forensic pathologists in the country.

Wow.

You know, that's awesome.

And I mean, how lucky was I?

I didn't even know there were women medical examiners.

And this is the one I meet.

And she gave me a tour of the autopsy suite, you know, the three stainless steel tables that are attached to the floor and the huge cooler that she opened and the.

filthy smelling, dead smelling

condensation rolls out like a horror movie.

And, you know, whoosh, you see the body bags in there and so that was my first taste of all this and i went back to do more research and finally i've always i tell everybody this if you want to find out things make yourself useful yeah so i said what can i do to be helpful here i started doing technical writing and then they became computerized and they and i ended up taking over their computer system but i'd go in the morgue every morning and i would watch the autopsies and i would take the notes for the doctors or i'd hang up bloody clothing um I'd put organs and scales and write down the weights.

And do, you know, I was the pill counter, you know, when your prescription drugs came in.

I'm the dummy who just gets to, you know, one, two, three.

I'm afraid he might have taken a little bit too much of his fentanyl.

I know it's not funny.

But

that, and so, you know, but it was all to write murder mysteries.

That's why I wanted to learn this.

It was, and I just was so fascinated.

All the forensic labs were upstairs.

And so I could go up to toxicology or fingerprints or back in the day, serology, what's now DNA.

And that is why my books have so much of that kind of detail because I had a six-year full-time education in it and then continue to learn it ever since.

So my medical examiner experience is that I...

I really ended up there six years because every book I wrote was nobody wanted.

I wrote post-mortem was the fourth, the fourth attempt.

That's wild to me.

By then, I thought it was going to be my post-mortem because I was

very dejected and unbelievably, you know, at that age, when you're 20s, in your 20s,

it's such a hard time because you're trying to figure out who you are.

What are you here for?

You know, do we have a purpose?

And when I kept failing at what I thought was my only purpose, which is to write, it was a very dark time.

But I will tell all of those who, everyone who listens to this, who gets discouraged, the thing about it is, if I'd gotten my way and my first murder mystery been published, number one, it would have ruined my career because it was really not good.

And two, I would have thought I knew enough and I didn't need to be at the medical examiner's office anymore.

And I needed to be there a long time to walk around in Scarpetta's shoes.

All right.

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.

I love that.

That's wild.

I still can't believe that you had trouble getting published at first.

It's, I wrote, it was a book a year.

The first year I was there, it was one book called The Stick Doll Murders.

And then the second one was Murder in the Lost Hundred.

Ooh, that sounds spooky.

And then the third one was called The Queen's Pond.

And no, no, no.

And then an editor said to me, I finally called up the same editor who rejected me three times.

You're not supposed to do that, by the way.

And I said, I know I'm not supposed to call you on the phone.

I said, but should I quit?

Oh my God.

She said,

no,

I don't think you should quit.

But I said, well, what am I doing wrong?

And she said, well, you work in a medical examiner's office, don't you?

And I said, yes, I do now.

And she said, well, the stuff that you're writing about, is that what you see every day?

And I said, I never see any of what I just, what I write about.

I mean, because I'm writing about buried treasure and archaeology digs that go wrong.

And, you know, all the, it was sort of like Agatha Christie meets autopsies and it didn't work.

It was a little, it was a hybrid.

Yeah.

And she said, and also your best character is this woman medical examiner named Dr.

Scarpetta.

She was a minor character in the first three books.

And she said, well, why don't you write it from her point of view?

I'd like to know what she thinks.

I thought, oh my God, I don't know if I can do that.

And if I show people what I really see and I let that invade my imagination, I don't know if I can survive it because I'm going down every morning and seeing horrors on the tables.

Someone struck by lightning, someone killed by a wild animal, somebody who's been raped and murdered.

I could, I mean, I've seen thousands and thousands of cases over the years.

And

by that time, there were serial murders that had just started in Richmond.

Oh, yeah.

This was 1987.

uh the Southside strangling cases and they were going they began while I was working at the ME's office.

And I'm telling you, all of us were terrified.

Yeah.

That's when I bought my first gun and took shooting lessons.

I put a deadbolt on my bedroom door.

I was divorced at that time.

So I was living alone.

And I thought to myself, and I watched Dr.

Fiero work in these cases.

She'd come home.

She'd get called out in the middle of the night.

And here's a terrible story.

One of the early victims in the Southside strangling cases was a woman neurosurgeon who was finishing her residency at the medical college of Virginia right down the road from the Emmy's office.

This lovely young woman.

And

here's the weird thing.

A year earlier, I'd been over to that medical college with Dr.

Fiero.

She was doing a lab, what they call a wet lab, where you take, or in this case, brains that have been fixed in formalin.

And I can tell you guys this, since you have a show named Morbid, this is your fault.

Your fault that you're getting all this, okay?

We'll take it.

She's doing a brain cutting around all all the neuropathology students and neurosurgeon residents and there was this one woman in a lab coat on the other side of the room young woman with long red hair and and i was feeling so ill at ease because i'm this stupid person it was an english major i'm not a med student i have three books that nobody's wanted and i'm still trying and And I was just, I don't know, I was having an uncomfortable moment and I felt somebody looking at me and I looked across the room and the red-headed woman was staring at me and she smiled.

Just as warm like hello you're fine here oh that's all it takes sometimes

that was the woman who was murdered oh

and when that happened a year later i remember i've never forgotten her looking at me and i mean and then i'm looking at her and and crime scene photographs when i'm out with

awful yes i can't imagine

and so i'm saying to myself how do i write about something like this without

adding to the problem or celebrating what we should condemn?

And I figured out, you know what?

If I'm going to show you the real thing, then damn it, I'm going to tell you the truth.

Yeah.

I'm going to do it through Scarpetta's point of view because that is the only way really that I can get away with it because she's not celebrating it at all.

She's trying to fix it.

She's doing a job.

She's also not going to lie to you and say, oh, it didn't hurt very much.

Nope.

She's going to say this was awful.

Right.

Um, that's what I love about her.

That's my very long story for how that all happened.

Now, you don't have to read my memoir when it comes to

in the spring.

Oh, I'm excited for that.

That's awesome.

I'll definitely read it anyways.

So that's when you may have to come visit me in person.

Oh, well, absolutely.

We're in, yeah.

Because you're welcome back anytime.

I can't wait to hear more about this.

And actually, like, I love hearing these stories because I worked as an autopsy technician in Boston.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah.

For I think five years, actually.

Well, that's really called in my own, my old biz, that's called burying the leaves.

Yeah.

Because I didn't know I was talking to a Confederate here where we can compare notes.

Yeah.

As soon as I heard you talking about like the wet, you know, wet specimens and the brain cutting.

The brain cutting.

I was like, no, it was a brain cutting.

And you know what?

You'll never forget that smell of formalin, will you?

No, no, you'll never.

And formaldehyde, which I hate even worse, at least the diluted stuff doesn't.

But that will take a while.

Yeah.

And you can taste it too.

It's awful.

Like foods that would taste like it later.

And so you understand when I write about that when Scarpetta comes home at the end of a long day at the morgue, that she, when she goes in the shower, or she showers in her office before she goes home,

appreciates that.

But she washes up inside her nose.

Yeah.

You have to.

And gargles because.

The molecules of the nasty stuff are in the air.

And when you're smelling it, it's because it's the molecules of lovely things things called putrefaction among other things

and that's what you're smelling yes it's all molecular and so she

scrub a dub dubs because you feel you feel i remember when i first started smelling that stuff i would start imagining i smelled it like right when i was getting ready to eat something yes oh yes yep yeah i was very surprised to i think like one of the first autopsies that i was part of i went to i went to dinner later that night with my husband and the first bite i took i was like why do I feel like this smells like what I was just in?

And he was like, that is horrifying.

It's your memory because your sense of smell is really your most powerful sense.

It blew my

neuroscientist partner, Stacey, could tell you all the reasons why that's the case.

But that's why smells, the olifactory

experience is so powerful.

And in fact, you can smell something and it can create, it triggers a memory that will actually

make you feel the way you did when you smelled it before.

Like I went to, and when I was in, I took a tour.

I drove across Austria way back in the early 90s.

And one of the things I wanted to see when I was there was the Mothausen death camp,

the concentration camp.

I'd read a book about it and I thought,

I want Scarpetta.

I want her to see this through me.

I want to see the reality of one of these horrible places.

And when when I was walking through one of the barracks where they'd kept these poor,

the Jewish prisoners that they were so merciless to, I thought I smelled the inside of a cooler.

And you know exactly what I'm talking about.

It's a very

cold death so powerfully that I said to the person I was with, I have to leave.

That was all just really a hallucination, obviously.

But it was a remembered odor.

And, you know, this may sound gross to people, but you need to understand why all this is important to human biology.

Yeah.

We are programmed to be repelled by things that we should stay away from.

Absolutely.

So, you know, if a whole colony was wiped out by a plague and you smell that in the woods when you're in the primitive age, you go the other way.

That might happen to you.

Yeah.

It just comes down to survival.

Absolutely.

And all of this is all about survival.

Our fear, our wanting to read scary stories is all about our survival instinct.

Yep.

It gets that fight or flight going.

Since you worked in a morgue, then when in my opening scene in Sharp Force, when Scarpett is working on a floater in the autopsy suite, some guy, poor guy that's been in the river for a while, then you know what that's like.

That's a unique experience.

For sure.

That is a very unique experience, a very unique smell, and a very unique

way of going about an autopsy.

It's totally different, which is crazy.

And that'll stay with you, that image for sure.

Well, you know, I was coming, this is a, I think, a wonderful way to think of it.

One day when I was working at the medical examiner's office and we had such a case,

a man who had been out fishing with his, his young boy in the James River in Richmond.

And this was a hot summer day and he, and we don't know why, or nobody knew why, but he ended up going overboard.

And his body wasn't found for a while.

So when it came to our office, it was very, you know, very, very decomposed.

And it was really, really awful.

I mean, it would really kind of, it would go through the whole building, to be honest with you.

And so I was in staff meeting and I was getting ready to go downstairs with Dr.

Fiero to scribe while she did her cases.

And she was going to do that one because she didn't, nothing faced her.

We're riding the elevator down.

And I said, you know, sometimes I really don't know how you stand this.

I don't know how you do it.

And she looked at me and she said, I just try to imagine him before he got here.

And so suddenly I saw this man on a beautiful summer day with his boy fishing, you know, with his baseball cap and the light sparkling on the water and everything's happy.

And he, that's what I tried to think when I was actually looking at what she was doing after that.

And I thought that that is how we should do it because we don't want to objectify human beings.

I mean, what we leave behind is not pretty, but we'd, but if we were around to see it, we would be embarrassed.

Yeah.

We'd say, we'd apologize.

Sorry, I'm such a mess.

Yeah, it's so true.

And it makes you feel like you have a purpose when you think of them that way before they got on the table.

There's a purpose to the whole thing instead of just meaningless, you know, clinical way of looking at it.

Like when I, One of the things I always say when I worked at the morgue was, it always like little things would get me during an autopsy, like somebody having nail polish on.

I was like, you didn't know that that was the nail polish you would be wearing forever.

Like that, that was the last time you were going to put on nail polish.

Or if they had their hair in a braid or something, I was always like, Wow, you just didn't know that that was your last hairstyle.

Right.

Like, it's, and I never wanted to cut those hairstyles.

I was always careful to not cut the braid off if I was doing a neuro case.

And

you have to make it personal.

You can't look at it just deadpan.

Because if you're you can't you have to have the ability to have some empathy and you imagine that person on the table is if it were your mother or some somebody you deeply care about if it's you yeah and and i and i do it what i'm so lucky that i was around the right kind of people when I was learning all this, but most of all, Dr.

Fiero.

And she used to, there was one thing she would never tolerate in her autopsy suite.

You so much you show even one iota of disrespect towards those cases in there and your ass is thrown out to say out out

yeah because it keeps you it keeps you on task to sit there you have to keep reminding yourself like this is somebody somebody

so i have to be as well you know the interesting thing in some cultures there is a belief that when you die your consciousness your spirit whatever you want to call it hovers around the body for a while so in in particular in primitive cultures they would not do anything to anybody.

They leave them for a while.

Even in Italy, I think it's, you've got to wait about 24 hours before you do an autopsy on somebody.

That makes sense.

And it's because of this, of not being sure when that transition is being made and trying to be as respectful as you can.

Yeah.

And so

I always just think, don't ever talk around a dead person.

Don't say anything in front of them.

You wouldn't say if they were still alive.

And then you're safe.

Yeah, exactly.

That makes sense.

It's so true.

Maybe their ghost won't bother you as much.

It won't creak in the walls and you won't hear someone walking on your floorboard late at night.

Yeah, you don't feel like they follow you home.

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Wake up to what's next.

Well, and with all your experience, I know that sometimes I find myself nitpicking in like pop culture, like books, movies, TV,

about crime scenes or autopsies if they get it wrong.

Are there things that drive you crazy that happen a lot in like pop culture for autopsies and crime scenes?

Well, I think one thing is when

somebody acts like they have a bedside manner in the morgue, it's ridiculous.

I mean, we're respectful.

You know that, but you're not saying, oh, now this won't hurt very much.

And then, of course, the other thing is, now I understand why TV has to do this.

I mean, because they're visual, but like if you've seen the shows like CSI where they have mirrors on the table so you can see the dead person's face.

Yeah.

Never.

Of course, that isn't done, but I understand.

My attitude is they're translating and making a story that works for their medium.

And have to make it palatable.

And a lot of what they do, they don't have a whole lot of choice because of what they're doing.

But there are,

I can't think of anything right off the bat, but there are, there are so many times where I've seen things where I go, you know, you didn't even try to get that right.

That's me too.

Those are the ones that I think.

And there's no way somebody would just say that, or that they would do what you just did.

Or I know when they touch things with no gloves on.

That makes me crazy.

And, you know, it's, or the no masks.

And why?

Because I get it.

You don't want the actress covering her face all the time.

But to be honest with you, the way people are bundled up in Tyvek these days, they really do look like a house under construction all wrapped up.

And so that's not a good look if you're a movie star.

No, it doesn't quite translate.

The gloves thing always drives me nuts, though, because I was always like, no, you wear like at least like three or four pairs of gloves.

So you can keep ripping them off the whole time.

So funny.

Well, I remember one of the early scripts for for the Scarpetta movie that never got made.

And by the way, we do have a show that will be out in the spring.

But

I remember that the writer had Scarpetta stopping.

at a in the middle of a terrible part of town at you know for a crime scene on her way home from something else she goes in she whips out her her makeup bag zips it open gets a pair of tweezers out and then goes and collects a piece of evidence with it

and i said what is it about

Where did that come from?

Well, she also was driving a red Tesla electric car.

And I thought, way back in the day, when I thought, she's not going to take any chance of that electric car battery going to go dead where she's parked right now.

Absolutely not.

You've never put an electric car there.

She's way too bad.

You don't see as much of that anymore, though.

People really truly, I know, because I'm dealing with screenwriters right now for the Scarpetta show, and they're much more well-versed in all this, the writers are, than they used to be and there's also so much more available yeah

even google yeah so true and you know there's so much more that you can find out for yourself now oh definitely and speaking of the scarpeta television series because i've been waiting for so long like i started reading your books i'm 39 i started reading your books when i think i was like 13 or 14 because i was super into it i read postmortem first i went all the way through my husband will buy me each new book whenever it comes out It's like the present he gets me.

That's very nice.

Will you tell him I thank you for that?

I will.

He'll love that.

But I've been waiting for this.

I've been really excited to see it on any screen, really.

And one thing that made me so excited was hearing that Bobby Cannavalle is playing Marino.

I feel like that is the most perfect casting choice.

I've told everybody, I said, and you really expect that he and Dr.

Scarpetta are not going to have an affair now that I, now that she knows he looks like that?

honestly.

She would say to me,

well, you didn't tell me he looks like that.

The way you describe him in your books, you can see why I didn't have an affair with him.

So anyway, yes, I think, and I can assure you, because I have seen, you know, the eight episodes that you will be seeing next year in the spring.

And

he's fabulous.

Oh, I believe.

And the scenes with him and Nicole Kidman and Jamie Lee Curtis, I mean, it's all,

you couldn't ask for a more powerful cast.

They've done a great job.

I think people are going to have fun.

I mean, don't expect it to be identical to my books because it can't possibly be

because it's TV.

But the other thing is,

if you think about my books, for the most part, there are a few that I wrote from what we call the third person point of view.

They're always from Scarpetta's perspective.

I mean, almost all of them, especially the ones now.

So if you're only seeing what she's seeing, seeing, the screenwriters have to create a lot of scenes that aren't in my books.

Yeah.

Like what happens when Marino goes home and has had a squabble with Dorothy or what's Lucy doing in the guest cottage?

You know, so those things.

And that's kind of fun because you're not only getting my story, but you're getting something new.

Yeah, absolutely.

I hope you and everyone will have lots of fun with it.

Oh, I'm sure I will.

Yeah, I'm so excited for it.

I'm very excited.

I think we'll have a big watch party.

Yeah, for sure.

Good.

You mentioned working with screenwriters.

Are you able to write on it at all?

Or have you been able to?

I haven't done any writing, but I do review all the scripts.

And,

you know,

my big thing is the techniques and the science.

all that, making sure, helping with that as best I can.

I've, you know, if they occasionally, they'll ask me to sit in on the writer's room if they have some questions.

And also just because I like to encourage them.

I love to encourage a lot of them are very young.

And

if that's at least I can do at this stage, because I know what it feels like.

I know what it feels like to get started.

Of course, they're doing a pretty good job getting started since they're on such a major show.

But it's not exactly small potatoes to start with when you're writing something for

three Oscar-winning actors, you know, Jamie and Nicole and also Ariana DeBose, who plays plays the dad.

Oh, awesome.

This is Dak.

I just want her to hurry up and sing, right?

Like, let's go.

This is an iconic cast.

It really is.

We're so excited.

Something else we're obviously so excited for is Sharp Force, which if you're listening to this

the day it premieres, it will come out.

Sharp Force will come out tomorrow, October 7th.

So while writing Sharp Force, what was the most bizarre piece of research that you did where you kind of thought if somebody saw this, I'd be in a lot of trouble?

Well,

the truth is, if anybody saw most of what I'm doing, I'd probably be in trouble.

I keep waiting for a knock on my door because of the kind of stuff I

search on the internet.

We can read it.

How many times can you be asking about this kind of weapon or how long it would take to kill somebody

before somebody decides they better check out your enterprise?

Yeah, what's going on in there?

But the hologram part of it, you know, that it was, it's, that was very creepy to research the notion that that you can create a hologram.

Well, let's just back up and say, what is the genesis of this?

Ghosts.

You know, we've heard about ghosts all our life, and you know people who have seen them.

Maybe you have, or you've had a weird experience that defines, defies any sort of explanation.

And so I thought,

I'm always interested in what technology could supply an answer or an explanation for things we see that we don't understand, whether it's Bigfoot, a quote, flying saucer, or in this case, a ghost.

And so I thought, is there technology that could create ghosts?

And the answer is yes.

Holographic technology combined with highly, highly technical drone technology that, you know, can be a flying projector, so to speak.

And understanding that electromagnetic energy isn't always light waves.

It can also be radio waves that can go right through your bedroom wall.

So the idea that you could wake up in the the middle of the night with this horrible phantom creature hovering over your bed, looking like something from the 1800s with red glowing eyes and saying, Death becomes you, death becomes you, death becomes you, and creepy music playing.

The idea that that could really happen is true.

Yeah, yeah,

that's the thing closer to it than ever.

I know we really are.

The hologram can't kill you, however, the serial killer who uses this for stalking, he does it before he shows up.

And

so

that was eerie

technology to be sort of digging into.

And the old psychiatric hospital, Mercy Island.

You know, I love creepy places.

Creepy places are a character.

And anyone with the show called Morbid certainly knows that.

Oh, yeah.

And then, of course, when she's driving home in the snowy kind of fog, and she hears this weird animal howling coming from the woods on her property.

And then it turns out when they do voice analysis, the vocalization of it does not seem to belong to any animal on this planet.

That is horrifying to me.

Yeah.

That's chilling for sure.

That alone would have been.

I love that.

I think that is so.

I don't know how she stays in her house.

I don't either.

No.

Every time I have a scene, I mean, I'm working on a new one now.

And Scarpetta's in her house and it's a horrible thunderstorm and a transformer's blown somewhere, kaboom, and the power goes out.

And all the security clamors are dark.

And I'm thinking, why are you staying in this place?

Get out.

Get out.

What are you doing, girl?

Find a nice little condo with a doorman.

Yeah, seriously.

Maybe like one of the tallest floors he can get.

Yeah, survival instinct.

Let's go.

She's never, she's never really scared.

She just takes it in stride.

She's always forgetting her gun.

Yeah, she never runs away, though.

She's never running.

Rats, I knew I left something behind.

This guy standing there in front of the greenhouse.

Oh boy.

We've all been there.

Yeah, you know,

happens.

And you know what after like more than 30 years of writing scarpeta how are you able to keep her evolving because you really do keep her evolving but but still maintaining what a badass she is like the core of what she is you know it's it's really important that i write stories that are set in the real world and the real world that we live in now which is changing at the speed of light yeah and it's a very hard world to set a murder a crime novel in because there's cameras everywhere i mean there's so much technology that if you're not careful, the book would be one page long.

Yeah.

Because we already know who did it.

You know, we

found their signal bouncing off that cell tower.

And then we got, you know, one cell DNA and figured out who did whatever.

So a lot of people aren't choosing to set thrillers and they set them in the 80s and the 90s for that reason.

I insist on letting Scarpetta, in fact, making her live in the same world we do, and then dealing with it accordingly.

And so by having that as my focus, you know, I'm going to come up with a different idea for every book because,

you know, if you're just watching what's going on in society and I have to know what all the latest technologies are, not only to use them, but to defeat them.

So that if I want a scene, you know, for example, if I don't want your phone picked up, no signal.

then then I might have you use a Faraday bag like this.

This is a real thing you put your phone in this and you cannot receive signals and they will not transmit signals and that's the kind of technology they use in what are called skiffs you know where you go over top secret information um they use what's called faraday cages or faraday bags that block out all electromagnetic signals like if you go to visit some of the various buildings at the fbi academy and quantico

they will take your phone the minute you walk into certain buildings and it gets put in a metal locker that's basically a Faraday cage.

Oh, wow.

Because your phone can be used to spy.

Yeah.

Oh, yeah.

Absolutely.

With Wi-Fi technology, we're, we're open channels for something to hack into it.

And as you know, from having worked in a medical examiner's office, the big threat these days are our phones and people going in and filming and photographing.

And then next thing you know, it's the bodies all over the internet.

Yeah.

We've seen, we've seen that every time there's a huge case.

That's all.

It's all over the news.

Oh, yeah.

It's such a problem.

problem and it becomes more and more of a problem as these phones get like smaller and thinner and have more technology on them and things you can hide it's crazy

and it's also now we also have to worry about photographs being posted out there that aren't even real they're fake that's and people believe that is the injury somebody had and it's completely made up so that these are all these are all part of the modern challenges that scarpetta lives with but but what i try to do is not get too bogged down in all that because people don't, it's withering after a while.

And people want, they want something that makes them feel.

Yeah, for sure.

Definitely.

The haunted old hospital where there's a burial ground, where there's suspicion about how some of those people in the asylum died hundreds of years ago.

You know, you want these things that

really go to our core.

Just like when you walk into Scarpetta's house, you want to smell her wonderful food.

You want something good in the kitchen.

You want a lovely bottle of wine or whatever they're going to open.

And, you know, that's, I try to make it a rich sensory experience for you, both good and bad.

You really have to, because that's one of the things I love about Scarpetta is that she's like a brilliant cook as well.

I love that she has those two parts of her because cooking is so creative and like, you know, emotional and grounding.

And everybody can be friends when they're eating.

You know,

I've had over the years, I've had a lot of people ask me, you think, I mean, does Scarpetta know Dexter?

And if she met Dexter, I mean, when she rat him out, and I said, well, listen, I, I believe that he lives near her.

And I think they get together on foodie night.

I love that.

Barbecues where she does

her flash dogs and her bourbon honey steaks on the grill.

And they, and they discuss pasta.

And so I don't know if she knows what he does, but I know she knows what he, what he eats.

Yeah, for sure.

I think so nice little potluck and i think that they're buddies i'm sorry but i think they get along just fine oh i love that that's canon now

that makes a great image in your hand well i know that person had it coming but but you know

natural causes she saw nothing

this tongue is great though yeah

so specifically for sharp force but honestly this can go with really any of your novels.

Were there any scenes you've written that you've thought like, hmm, like this might be too far.

I should tone this down.

Or, or when you feel that way, if you have, do you just like lean further into it?

I don't feel that way about what I'm, what I write these days because I'm really, really careful of it.

But there were some books I wrote earlier, particularly when I decided not to use Scarpetta as the point of view, but to have it more what they call the omniscient point of view, you know,

third person, which means you have to spend time with the killer.

yeah it's going to show what the killer's doing or thinking and

in my book book of the dead which ironically won one of the biggest awards of all my books but but in my but there are things i did in that book that i wouldn't do again and i mean this character that bad the evil person was into cannibalism and it was it was quite graphic.

It disturbingly so for me.

I mean, I quit eating at my desk while I was writing that book.

But here's, I actually had somebody, I won't say who or where, but there was a research facility where I was offered that, they said, would you like to cook some human flesh and see what that smells like?

And I said, no, I would not.

No, no, thank you.

I do not need, I will not go that far for my.

my research.

Like, thank you for offering.

I mean,

I don't know what people think, but I've been asked if I wanted to try the scalpel and do a Y incision.

And I said, no, never.

That's not for me to do.

I am an English.

I don't practice on a dead body.

No, no, no.

I'm just, I'm an author.

No, that's not for me to do.

You do it and I'll describe what you did.

Yeah.

There you go.

Yeah.

Yeah.

You're like, I can, I can observe and still have all that I need to see.

But it's a good question because everybody should have certain boundaries.

Yeah.

And,

you know, I don't want.

It's an alarm system that's built in me.

And actually, I think my books are a little bit more gentle that way than they used to be.

It will sound crazy, but I try to kill people without it hurting too much.

I love that.

I love how you're doing.

Even though they're bad.

Even if they're bad, I just, I just say, you know what?

I'm going to get rid of you.

You have to be done in.

But

I'm not going to drag this out.

Just, it won't be too terrible.

Just go back to sleep.

And

you'll end up in some other book and you'll be fine.

Yeah, there you go.

We'll dispatch a view here.

We'll see you later.

Well, that makes so much sense to me because

I've published two books and they're, you know, serial killer thrillers.

And they also have a female medical examiner that I kind of like got from my own experience.

And I found this a challenge in my own books.

And I think you're so masterful at this in particular.

I'm curious to know how you manage to maintain such like sharp and that pun intended sharp accuracy forensically in your books.

Like you really keep all of that so accurate and so grounded, but you also, you're welcome.

And you also keep that pace, though, in your books really tight and keep it really thrilling.

So I'm just wondering how you're able to maintain, like, how do you achieve that?

Well, fortunately, because I started out actually learning from being in the actual environment, like if I wanted to know what the scanning electron microscope would do with, you know, if somebody used.

one of these little things, a post-it you to lift trace evidence off of, you know, they're putting it on the hand or or whatever because things will adhere to that very weak adhesive that then go up to the trace evidence lab and then you might see something on the scanning electron microscope that's magnifying something 100,000 times maybe even a million times and and and when you learn about these technologies and and and what they are and how it works And that, for example, a scanning electron microscope on Earth is actually doing something very similar to what the Webb telescope does out in space, where it's it's not only defining the morphology the shape of what you're looking at like a a jagged piece of dust might look like an asteroid when it's magnified that much with the with the microscope but but it's also telling you what something's made out of you know it can tell you that an asteroid's made out of platinum it can tell you that this fleck of paint also has has traces of of lead that might mean it's old paint or there's a a little bit of asbestos or that there's many layers of paint meaning the car was painted over and over again multiple times.

And that would be a unique identifier if you find the car that hit that person, the hit and run.

See what I mean?

Yeah.

So if you've learned the fundamentals of these scientific applications, then when you roll ahead 35 years,

as long as you keep up with what's actually being used, it's really not changed that much.

You now have rapid DNA testing where you can put a swab in a little

machine, basically.

And in minutes, it will give you a DNA profile.

Well, there was no such thing as that.

No, definitely not.

Just getting started, but it doesn't change the DNA science.

It's just what it tells you is that it's so sensitive now that in some cases, it's almost an obstruction.

Because if you can walk through a room and leave one cell of DNA, one skin cell, that's going to give your profile.

What if that skin cell is from eight months ago?

Oh, yeah.

You're picking picking up all kinds of stuff that is actually because it's so sensitive.

It's both good and it's bad because it's also picking up all kinds of things that are interfering with what you're thinking.

So it's just if you learn, you build on what you learn.

If you stop learning, then one day the gap is too big and you can't catch up.

So what I say to everybody is whatever you're interested in.

And if you spent a lot of time in your early years getting proficient in it, keep up with it.

Yeah.

Because you'll understand all the changes.

but you got to know the fundamentals first.

That's so true.

That is definitely.

You let that gap happen.

Like what you said is totally correct.

Because having to catch up on all that afterwards, you're just going to be completely out of the galaxy with it.

There's no way

to autopsies are

not done all that differently than they were back in the days when Michelangelo was, you know, doing it to learn more about what the human body looks like.

I mean, so

there are tech, there are things you can use in modern times, like scanning equipment.

You know, the virtual autopsy, which is, you know, done with a CT scanner, like the military uses, like the Baltimore Medical Examiner's Office has one of those.

But, you know, for the most part, I think autopsies will just keep being done the way they've been done.

First of all, as you know, anybody that's worked in that system, it is not, Scarpetta has an unusually amazing budget.

She sure does.

She's always complaining about her budget, but whatever she wants, it's somehow magically there.

Which you need.

Because I'm Santa Claus.

You can give it to her.

You know, we not only need that kind of microscope, but we need one of these kinds, too.

Are you giving one?

Just another million dollars.

That's fine.

Don't worry about it.

That's actually, it's funny because when I worked in the morgue, I was shocked to find out that the things we used as rib cutters were just like hedge clippers from Home Depot.

Like they were the orange.

And the dirty.

Oh, listen,

when I worked in the morgue, and since the main the main show was dr fiera the woman who then became the first woman chief uh in virginia um she would bring in the knitting needles from her her in-laws

the mother and the mother-in-law but because they all they they they're italians they all lived in the same house she'd bring in the knitting needles they didn't need anymore and she used them for billet bullet probes so she'd get out the knitting needle

you know put that here's the entrance let's see where that thing oh it stops here nope there you know especially in multiple gunshot wounds

it worked fine.

Now, you could buy a bullet probe, but for X number, hundreds of dollars.

It's the same thing.

We, when I was doing some research in the Charleston Medical Examiner's Office in South Carolina,

this is my idea of having fun with a forensic pathologist on the lunch break.

We went shopping.

We went shopping to a restaurant supply store.

Oh, my God.

So huge pots so that when they're deep, when they were, you know, when the skeletonized body stuff, you know, bodies are coming in, when you want to clean the bones, you, you boil all this.

Well, that takes a very

big cauldron.

And so you can't get that in your regular place.

So that my treat, my treat, because I was making the big bucks.

I'd take them shopping.

I'd say, your heart's content, any ladle you want, any big pot, any two cup steel measuring cup so that when you're seeing how some, how much someone hemorrhaged in their chest cavity i'm your person

you're santa claus to all look at that

now that's that is morbid christmas yeah

that is you need to come on morbid more you fit right in see nobody's gonna like me anymore after hearing this because now they're hearing what a weirdo i am no you came to the right place

our listeners will love you our listeners are called weirdos in fact exactly well you know it's well i'll tell you the weirdest research i ever did and i don't recommend this for anyone but i really did want to know how long a bite mark if you bit somebody after they're dead how long does that bite mark if it's an indentation how long can you see that before it might fade well i didn't know any dead people that would want me to bite them not that i would be willing nor did i know any living ones including me who might agree to such a thing and wouldn't be the same because i'm going to heal so i thought well what about a piece of chicken a dead you know raw chicken oh there you go So that's what I did.

I practiced the bite marks with a piece of raw chicken and answered my question and then would very quickly wash my mouth off with the most powerful antiseptic you've ever been.

That's exactly what I was just going to ask.

That was lawless of you.

Anything for the research, though, right?

If I were to do it again, I don't know why I didn't just get a pair of dentures or fake.

Oh, yeah.

Wouldn't that have been smarter?

But you know what?

I'm a little bit slow on the take sometimes.

I should have just, there were many ways to simulate that without me putting my own silly little chip chops on it.

You would just get some horrible disease from raw chicken meat.

You'd get some salmonella.

All in a day's work, right?

Well, what'd you find out?

I found out that they would fade a little bit and that if someone bites a dead chicken, we probably can figure out that the chicken was bitten.

In other words, it was rather worthless.

All right.

You know, but you can say you didn't.

It didn't work for my purposes, whatever.

I just was curious.

And you know what?

You have a good story now, so it was worth it.

But you know that I was also the blood supplier when I would do, when I would be filmed for like Primetime Live or various big shows, and they wanted blood on the floor for something.

And so I'd say, you know, I'll be right back.

And I go and prick my finger and go dripping blood everywhere.

Oh my goodness.

Just leave your DNA.

There you go.

You're welcome.

I mean,

if you have a copy of From Potter's Field, oh, now here is a morbid factoid that hardly anybody knows.

Oh, I love that.

If you have

the early hard copy of From Potter's Field, which came out in the mid-90s.

On the cover, there is a footprint in snow that has blood drips on it.

Okay.

Now, I made that footprint footprint in snow by buying an antique military boot.

We put fake snow out, we put the boot print in it.

I pricked my finger and bled my own blood.

And so I said, hypothetically, my DNA is on the cover of that book.

That is so bad, actually.

That is my blood you're looking at.

Because,

you know, nobody else had any blood handy.

So I said, Oh, Biggie, I'm

like, I got some.

I got a lot.

You took blood, sweat, and tears to the next level off that one.

Yeah.

Amazing.

Switching gears a little bit here.

I want to talk about your characters a little bit.

And obviously, you've been writing them for a while.

So do you feel like they kind of lead you to where they want to go sometimes at this point?

Or do you feel totally in control writing them where they should be?

You know, it's a funny thing.

I guess the best way to answer that is i would say it's a collaboration because i i think in terms of scenes you know some and sometimes i'll each have a list of certain scenes that i want to do and and i kind of map out how to get her to the to wherever that scene is but sometimes

she has ideas of her own

and and there are also times uh where she and marina are getting in the truck to head somewhere and i'm not really sure what they're going to find when they get there and i'm and i'll say to them not literally but i'm thinking i hope you know what you're doing because i'm drawing a big blank about where to go after show me right they're driving along wishing they had a cigarette chewing gum they're not listening to me no in fact i they you know when they go to the the food court after a hard day of working terrible crime scene they they sit there and marino says you know it was like something straight out of a patricia cornwell novel do you not even know that you're in a novel

well do we know what we're we're in?

Maybe we're in a novel.

Maybe.

Sometimes I feel that way.

It does feel that way.

I love that.

Well, there is the theory that we're living in a simulated universe.

And every once in a while, you'll be like, is it true?

Like, sometimes things happen that you're like, makes sense.

Yeah.

So how does it feel?

I have to ask this, to have inspired literally like a generation of thriller slash crime writers, particularly women, specifically me.

Good.

Then I've done a good thing if I've inspired you.

You really have.

Like you are the first person, especially like a woman writer and writing about the things that I was so excited to learn about because I was always very interested in like the autopsy part.

Now, in your books, is your main, who is your main character?

My main character is Dr.

Wren Moeller.

And what kind of doctor is she?

She's a forensic pathologist.

Ah, well, now I'm going to give you a, I'll share a trade secret with you, though, since we both write about the same thing.

Is, you know, when I was getting started medical examiners had a very prescribed thing that they did and sometimes the forensic pathologists would go to a crime scene and back in those days there weren't really death investigators but in but you know they they had they they did their thing and they testified in court and that was and they taught and that was about it

It's really these days boundaries are not quite so clear.

And I know a lot of forensic pathologists who've gone way over those boundaries, you know, where they actually will get more involved in helping you reconstruct what happened to some, you know, in a shooting or this.

And I think that

we have permission to make our forensic pathologists a little bit more proactive, especially since this is something most people don't know.

And I don't know if this is true in Massachusetts, but I do know it's true in

like the Los Angeles coroner's office, that a lot of forensic pathologists are also peace officers.

They are sworn police.

And they have to have a gun.

They have to know how to shoot it.

They carry a badge and they can arrest people,

but they don't usually do it.

And one of the reasons that they're peace officers is very often these people, they respond to scenes in very dangerous areas, as you know.

Absolutely.

My only thing I would say to you is.

You know, you can let your person, you know, maybe you already do, but I think that you can have them more proactive.

Because one of the things I would get frustrated with, with writing about a medical examiner, is I want her to sit down with a family and talk to them in their home.

I want her to go somewhere.

I want her to do something.

I want her to get, I want more drama.

Yeah, absolutely.

And so I have really ramped up the drama.

I mean, I have Scarpetta doing all kinds of things that she might, you know, maybe she wouldn't really do, but it doesn't matter, does it?

Yeah, and it makes sense.

But I had to learn to not be too wedded to what I knew was true.

And that it took me years

to get over working the real environment all the time.

Because I'd feel like, well, you can't have her do that, a medical examiner.

Oh, no, she can't be a helicopter pilot.

No medical examiner could be a helicopter pilot.

She better make Lucy the helicopter pilot.

Well,

if I were doing that again today, I probably would have Scott to be a helicopter pilot.

Because why not?

I might have that.

She learned it in the military.

Who knows what I would do?

I would give her a very different background.

If I were starting this all over again, I would have her more,

a little bit more dramatic, more involved in stuff.

And I think that you can do that.

You know, it's sort of like in Great Britain where they have what's called a police surgeon.

Yeah.

That's really the old tradition is having a doctor that assists with the police, but that, you know, but they're actually kind of working more with the police than just something that's very separate from it.

So I would say, pull out all the stops, baby.

Hell yeah.

I love, that's great advice.

I love that.

Cause I love having that.

Cause

I think it's fun to say one of the things I love about Kay Scarpetta, especially is that we get to see so much of her life, like inside and outside of the morgue.

And I think she has so much agency outside of the morgue as well.

So that's why like her character has really always been my number one girl because I just really think she's such a badass in and outside of what she does.

Oh, well, listen, if we, if we did a laundry list of how many people she's had to kill,

how many times someone's tried to kill her,

I don't think there's any human on the planet that's had so many near-misses or so many dramatic moments as Dr.

Scarpetta.

But considering she's been out there for 35 years, I don't, if she wants to carry her gun and her bulletproof Kevlar briefcase that Lucy gave her, that by the way, is also fireproof and can sustain a microwave weapon, true story.

I mean, I have one under my shelf over here.

Oh, I love that.

So, because when I write about something like that, then Stacey decides, my partner decides that I should have a Kevlar briefcase too.

And I'm thinking, but where might I carry that?

I love that.

Everywhere.

I love that.

She's like, you're Santa.

She's like, well, you need one too.

I order strange things.

If I have the characters wearing a gas mask, then I've got to know what it feels like to put one of those on.

And so I order stuff and then end up giving it away to somebody who would want such a strange thing.

That's awesome.

So you're very tactile.

Well.

If I believe it, then you'll believe it.

Yeah, it makes sense.

If I don't believe what I'm saying, because I really really don't know the answer, then I just can't write about it with authority.

For sure.

So I try to, I mean, a lot of things you can just, you can imagine, you can fill in the blanks.

You don't have to try everything.

And certainly don't try, you know, being a serial killer.

Don't do that.

Yeah, don't try that.

That's great advice.

Great advice.

Yeah.

If you take one thing away.

But I think there's never a substitution for witnessing something for yourself if you can.

Yeah.

Because

you will learn something.

You will be surprised by a detail you will never, ever imagine.

I remember the first time I stood out on a launch pad for, you know, at a NASA site on Wallops Island in Virginia, where they fire rockets off all the time.

And I was taken out to this launch pad, and it was very windy.

It's right on the ocean.

It's a stark, barren landscape with all the scaffolding.

I'm looking at it, and I've seen pictures.

I know what it looks like.

But what I never knew is when the wind was blowing through the scaffolding it created this eerie music

it was just eerie and it was like space music and i'm standing there and i'm thinking am i the only one hearing this right now and you never would have known that yeah no but it's just you get

you get surprised and if you go to the if you see cases that come into the medical examiner's office, the poignancy of

like people, and I'm so sorry to say it, but people who have a baby die and then it's brought in and it's in the bassinet.

And

that just goes right through you.

You see that.

And, or you find, I'll never forget that this was a true case, a real case in my early days at the morgue where this woman had gone out to a bar and she's walking home.

along a highway around three o'clock in the morning,

you know, drunk, and she gets hit by a car and she ends up in in our office.

She's on the table in the next morning.

And so the, she,

the state trooper's going through her stuff and he pulls the little slip of paper from a fortune cookie out of her wallet that clearly meant so much to her that she saved it.

And it said, you will soon have an encounter that will change the course of your life.

Wow.

I just got

little did she know that that encounter was a car on a dark highway.

Yes.

And I'll never forget the look on the state trooper's face.

He didn't know whether to laugh or to cry for a minute.

Wow, that's true.

Because it's so bizarre.

Like, what are the odds?

Or the goofy teenage boy who thinks it's cool, he's trying to impress some girl.

He's like 13 or 14, and this country boy standing up in the back of a pickup truck.

And

they went under an overpass and he hit his head.

He comes in, and in his pocket is a dented can of old spice deodorant.

Oh, man.

And you can imagine that he is trying to smell nice with these girls he's trying to impress that he's showing off for, and that's the last moment of his life.

And these are the sort of things

that

it's very, they're so important for me to remember and to witness.

And

because if you don't put the humanity into all this, we can joke all we want about morbidity, but if you don't really tell it in the lap of life going on and those, and the pain and the reality of all this, if you don't recognize it at some level, then it's really not worth telling the story.

And nobody should want to read it either.

No, it's so true.

And it, all of that really reminds me of like, you know, the nail polish that I would see on people and be like, that you just painted your nails and like had no idea what was going to come next and that that was it forever.

It's like those little things were the things that shocked me about my first few autopsies was how they like affected me.

It's very true.

I mean, one of the, I did a show that had to do with Princess Diana's death.

This was about 20 years ago, a little over 20 years ago.

And one of the people I interviewed was the assistant, the pathology assistant who was there for her autopsy.

Oh, wow.

And

the thing that I remembered so vividly is that he said she had on turquoise toenail polish.

Oh.

And it's just like that little thing.

And I, you know, I know everything else that he said, you know, about what he found and some of the injuries and all that.

But the two things that struck me the most were the turquoise toenail polish that she had on, that she put on right before, I guess she'd gone to the Ritz or whatever in Paris.

And that.

I was told by somebody who saw her body that a lot of her fingers were broken.

Oh, wow.

And I can't vouch for that myself, but I suspect it's true because because she and Dodi Alfayed were not, they weren't wearing seatbelts in the back of that car.

And here's one of the main reasons you would wonder if it's really a conspiracy, their deaths, is if they'd had their seatbelts on, they might not have died.

Yeah.

But they didn't.

So when you bam, hit that cement piling in that tunnel,

you're going to go forward.

And the same thing happens in plane crashes and people break their fingers.

I'm trying to, it's, it's a

impact.

Yeah.

That's like the first thing you do.

But it's so, and it's those details that humanize.

Yeah.

And then you see this poor person.

She might have been one of the most famous women in the world, but it's the poignancy of those human details that grab us.

Yeah.

Not so much how much their heart weight.

Who cares?

Yeah.

Right.

It's like she's a mom.

She's a friend.

She's, you know, she's a woman.

She's just, she's more than what.

she is on the table.

That was always the thing that we were always trying to maintain was this is more than just a body on the table.

This is somebody, somebody.

Well, here's the thing.

If you don't see it as more than just a body on the table, you may miss a very important clue.

That's that you shouldn't be in that morgue if you don't see it.

I mean, really, truly, because, you know, for example,

I remember this early case of a terrible sexual homicide.

This young woman comes home and the guy's hiding in her closet because he had a key.

He's a maintenance worker.

And she, I mean, it wasn't solved for a long time, but it was a horrible case.

Horrifying.

And we, she, he was with her all night long.

And she died about six o'clock the next morning.

And when her body came to the office, we took it in the x-ray room.

And this was in the early days when we were just starting to use lasers to look for trace evidence on the body because some things will light up and you find them.

And so this was a new thing.

And we were in there using the laser, going over her whole body, looking for any evidence.

And it was remarkably clean.

And the thing that I noticed is that her legs were so cleanly shaven that either they'd been waxed or she just shaved them.

And so I'm thinking, well,

she'd been out all day.

She came home late at night.

She didn't die until the next morning.

She shouldn't look this smooth.

No.

And so I thought, I guarantee you, this guy made her take a bath.

And yeah.

And I guarantee that he made her shave her legs, you know, and maybe because that was part of his ritual and part of the control that he was exerting over her.

but if you're not really looking at that person you're not going to start thinking things like that and wondering you're not getting into them and trying to channel what might have happened to them exactly and we owe them that

as painful as that is we owe them our most sincere and devoted attention yeah at that last moment i mean god knows what they've been through if we don't if they don't talk to us and we don't listen then nobody's going to so true.

So true.

Is there a book that you've read recently that just like blew your mind?

This is a book I keep on my desk that blows my mind.

And I highly recommend it.

It's called The Creative Act,

being by Rick Rubin.

And it's all about creativity and these little quotes and stuff, like it's not unusual for science to catch up with art.

Eventually.

Oh, look at that.

Or it's not usual for art to catch up to the spiritual.

But there's all stuff, all kinds kinds of things in here that if you are a creative no matter what kind of creative writer artist scientist podcaster um that

it it it writes your perspective of of the creative process and of the things to be mindful of to make it work for you better that's so cool and the biggest thing it teaches you is to let go don't try to force things i love that which i think we all need yeah that's great advice yeah everybody needs that but i you should order this.

I keep it on my desk.

What was that called again?

I'm going to write it down.

The creative act, a way of being by Rick Rubin, who's a music producer.

All right.

I want to order that.

Yeah, but look, I mean, I'm telling you that it's something that you will keep around.

I mean, I like to read things.

There are novels that I'll look at because the writing is so amazing, like Chris Whitaker.

Oh, yeah.

All the colors of the dark.

And he is really such a talented, brilliant writer.

And I like to look at what he does with words and how he sets the scene.

He's a young guy.

I'm still learning, you know, from people.

Oh, yeah.

I have a Hemingway novel that I've been rereading for decades called The Garden of Eden.

Oh, yeah.

And it was published posthumously.

And it's not the best example of his work, but it's fascinating because the main character.

is a novelist and it's and you know it's really Hemingway's you know alter ego But he describes what it's like to get up in the morning and walk and feel the cold stone under his bare feet as he's walking down to the end of this hotel hallway where he is writing in his room and looking out at the ocean and all these things.

And

he laments about how writing makes him selfish.

And he knows he's selfish because, and anybody, hello, if you're, if this is what you're doing, you kind of cut off, you cut out everybody while you're doing it.

And those who live with us have to know that if we don't do that, we won't get it done.

Exactly.

But it does.

But I was so grateful and continue to be, in addition to some of the amazing ways Hemingway describes things.

But

it's nice to read something that

you relate to.

Oh, yeah.

That you go, I know exactly what he's feeling.

I feel the same thing.

I may not be Hemingway, but I know what he's feeling.

Yeah.

It makes you feel seen for sure.

And honestly, that's what a lot of your books did for me when I started working in the morgue.

It was like, oh, I get this.

I know that smell.

Like, I know how she's feeling here.

I know the frustration in this point.

And I find myself now still loving that kind of thing, but also loving to read books about writers where a writer is a main character.

Because I'm like, yep, I know that frustration now.

So it is.

It's so true.

When you can relate, it's just such a richer story, I feel like.

Yes,

I agree.

Well, you know, I feel like that's really why we are storytellers.

We want people to gather around and to make them feel included and to share an adventure with them.

It's not supposed to be this isolative experience where, oh, look at what I did.

Now tell me how good I am.

In fact, if you really do a good job as a writer, people shouldn't be all that conscious of your writing.

What they should see is what you're showing them.

Yes.

They should, woof, you know, that scene, you're taking them on a journey.

It's not a book.

It's a plane ticket.

It's a ticket to ride.

It's a voyage.

We want to take places that, you know, that your medical examiner in mind, we want them to take people places that they don't usually get to go.

And

medical examiner facilities are really that way more than they used to be because ever since COVID in particular, many of these places are very closed.

They don't want anybody coming in.

They're worried about.

leaks.

They're worried about diseases.

They're worried about lawsuits.

They're worried about everything.

Oh, yeah.

COVID was a wild time in the morgue.

I was working in the morgue during COVID.

It was a sight to see when Elena would come home.

Yeah, we had different, you know, the protocols for that went crazy.

I mean, it needed to, but it was in particular doing neuro cases, doing a brain cutting.

We had to like build a box over the person's head and then use our arms in like full, you know, gear to do it.

That's exactly what that, if you go to Johnson Space Center and you want to touch a moon rock, it's something

this tank, I think, is filled with nitrogen, and they have the gloves spilled in and you have to manipulate it with the it's called glove

yeah that's what we did with the brain cutting that so you just you became an astronaut yeah no look at that i didn't even know it so there you go look at me i can add it to my recipe doing all kinds of things well you know that's an interesting thing that you could describe because we hope that covet doesn't come back but you could have you could have anything that is hazardous yeah toxic possibility radiation poisons anything where you have to implement those kind of protocols.

And the nice thing is you know exactly how it works.

Oh, yeah.

It was, it's so true.

I could describe that to a T.

You could come up with almost anything where you, I mean, you could have a big piece of the International Space Station that crashes down to Earth with somebody that didn't make it.

And you can't treat that like normal

things because of where it's been.

Yeah.

And when the flying saucer shows up, you know, with one of those little grape people in it, you can take all kinds of precautions.

All the same precautions.

But we hope that those are the visitors don't die.

We don't want them in the morning.

Yeah, we don't want that.

We want to hang with them.

Yeah.

Exactly.

We want to hang with them.

Yeah.

Find out about them.

Well, Patricia, thank you so much for joining us.

This has been so much fun.

Well, you're very welcome.

It has been fun.

This has been amazing to both of you with everything.

Thank you so much.

And also, just so you know, you're in the acknowledgements of my first book.

Oh, we'll have to send it to you.

You should.

Yeah.

Well, I think your character needs to occasionally give scarpetta a call just compare notes oh my god there you go the dream i don't i'm just telling you they know each other are you aware i feel like they do

i think they do i think that they are friends and they didn't tell us but i she didn't tell me much she doesn't think i exist but what i'm telling you is hmm you know i bet that they're buddies i think i bet you know what i bet they hang out with dexter both of them oh 100 that's real now that's canon

i love it well everybody check out the latest installment to Patricia's work, Sharp Force, which comes out tomorrow if you're listening to this right away.

That's so good.

October 7th.

And we also can't wait to tune in to Scarpetta next spring.

Huge congratulations to you.

And thank you again.

Thank you.

Thank you so much.

Take care.

You too.

And you're welcome back anytime.

Yeah, please come back.

We will.

Yeah, definitely.

All right.

We'll see you then.

All right.

Thank you.

Bye.

How fucking cool was that?

That was so, that was so fun.

It was awesome.

You're geeking.

when she said when she told me that kay scarpetta and ren muller would be friends yeah that's that was next level shit i'll even i was just like oh my god yeah i'm not even here anymore no elena has passed away i'm i've shuffled off i i have danced off this mortal coil

did a little jig off this mortal coil Fucking awesome.

We hope you guys dug that as much as we did.

Also, we are going to bring back the Morbid Book Club.

Yeah.

We've decided.

Patricia.

Because remember we have a we have a bonus episode to play around with so we can make it whatever the fuck we want yeah patricia inspired us i haven't read any of the scarpetta series and how i want to love her so in the next couple of months we're going to start with it's post-mortem postmortem is her first book in the series all right so our bonus episode in a couple months will be going over post-mortem so everybody start reading if you haven't yet yeah i figured we'll we'll sprinkle in the book club here and there on a bonus episode so it's we're gonna make those fun

they can be all kinds of things.

So if you guys want to get with us on the post-mortem thing so we can talk about it and go through it.

So you can listen to it.

You can read it.

You have a couple months to catch up on it.

We'll let you know when it's coming.

Also, how fucking awesome is Patricia's voice?

Great voice.

She is literally Clarice Starling.

Elena said it to me before we started the interview and I was like, oh, as soon as it started, as soon as she started talking, I was like, oh, wow.

Yeah.

I was like, she created one of my favorite characters and she sounds like one of my favorite characters.

She is my favorite character.

I damn Patricia.

I love it.

Yeah, that was phenomenal.

It really was.

Check out Patricia's, all of Patricia's stuff.

We got Sarapetta coming.

We got

Sharp Force coming.

And in a couple months, we'll have post-mortem.

Go take it back to the beginning.

So we hope you keep listening.

And we hope you keep it.

Weird, but not so weird that you don't join us for our book club and check out all of Patricia's things because it's so good.

Everything is so good.

Some

Hey listeners, I'm Ash.

And I'm Elena.

And we are so excited to have joined the SiriusXM family.

And you know what?

If you want to keep hearing new episodes of Morbid ad-free, subscribe to SiriusXM Podcast Plus on Apple Podcasts or visit seriousxm.com/slash podcasts plus to listen with Spotify or another app of your choice.

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