The 911 “shots fired” call had come in at 9:30 p.m. Dr. Short had wrapped his elbow wound and was taken to Hamilton General Hospital. Mike Holk was the senior ranking officer, 48 years old, a 24-year veteran on the force. It was an ugly night, cold and wet. He found the Short house, got out of his unmarked car and stepped into the downpour, walking towards the flashing police lights. A uniformed officer approached. The detective identified himself. “Staff Sergeant Holk,” he said, and flashed his badge. “Who’s in charge?”
The cop took Holk to meet John Bronson. Bronson, himself a veteran cop and detective, was the duty officer assigned to evaluate the scene before handing it off to Holk. Bronson said there had been shots from the rear of the home. Blew through the den window—window frame, actually. Two holes visible.
Orders were given to expand the official crime scene area, to include the front and back yards, swaths of the wooded area. About ten acres in all. They used so much yellow tape they almost ran out. All officers entering the crime scene had to record their movements to minimize contamination of any evidence. Holk stood in the driveway, rain pelting his trench coat, water streaming down his face and mustache.
It didn’t take long for him to see it, the cardboard box on the upper part of the driveway.
“What do we have?” Holk asked.
It was a ski mask. Black. One of the officers covered it with the box to keep the evidence dry. Was it the sniper’s? And why would he have left it there? Dropped it? In a hurry? Frightened by something? A plant, by either the shooter or another party, to confuse police? It all raced through Mike Holk’s mind—all questions, no answers. Even though he was a veteran cop, the whole scene left him feeling ill at ease, his head spinning. It was all so—big. The crime scene. The questions. Who comes to a place like this, he thought, on a miserable night like tonight, waits in the shadows and takes a shot at a physician?
At the hospital, Detective Mike Campbell met with Short’s wife, Katherine, her husband’s blood still fresh on her clothes. Dr. Short, meanwhile, was awake when Detective Peter Abi-Rashed came to his bedside in the trauma suite. He had been treated, was in stable condition and could talk. Abi-Rashed was broad shouldered, with dark hair, olive skin, dark eyes. He was a sharp investigator who had a playfully brusque manner. He followed the book on investigating. You put the biggest umbrella possible over the investigation, consider all angles.
“Is my family all right?” asked Short.
“They’re fine, Dr. Short.”
It’s not something a homicide detective telegraphs to a victim, but the cold fact is, the first suspect who needs to be eliminated in an attempted-murder investigation is—the victim himself. Suicide. But Abi-Rashed was satisfied, after conversations with medical staff, that Short’s wound from a high-powered rifle could not have been self-inflicted. He needed to start fishing for suspects.
“Dr. Short, can you think of any reason someone would want to do this to you?”
“I can’t think of any reason for the shooting,” he replied.
A doctor, any doctor, can have disgruntled patients, patients who might not be entirely mentally stable. Hugh Short was an OB. Delivered babies, performed standard gynecological services. Like most doctors, he had a couple of patients who had been unhappy about something—but there was nothing to suggest they’d want to shoot him.
Dr. Short mentioned one call that was a bit different, though. About ten years earlier a man named Randy Dyer had called Short’s office. Dyer had been bitter towards the doctor for a long time because his girlfriend had had an abortion against his wishes, and he was certain Short had performed the procedure and terminated his unborn son. There were days when the darker instincts inside Dyer urged him to hurt Dr. Short for what he had done. But in fact by the time Dyer actually phoned Short, in 1985, the bitterness was gone. He wanted the doctor to know he no longer felt ill will towards him. Hugh Short’s receptionist had put the call through. Short picked up.
“Hello?” Dr. Short had said.
“I want to say, as a Christian man, I forgive you for taking the life of my child in 1982.” A disquieting experience, but certainly no threat.
Peter Abi-Rashed met with the other detectives, then drove out to the house to take a look. He ducked under the police tape, went upstairs and saw the chair where Short had been sitting, saw the splinters on the floor from where the two rounds had punctured the wooden window frame. Camera flashes popped in the dark backyard. Ident was out there—forensic identification officers.
Detective Larry Penfold was out in the rain with his partner, Bill Cook. Time was short to gather evidence and take photos. The forecast was not good, snow on the way. It would cover the scene, transform it. The scientific ballistic work needed to be done to determine where the shots had come from, the bullet trajectory. In the critical early hours, Penfold and Cook tried to reconstruct what had happened. “Tell me a story,” Penfold beseeched his surroundings.
The bullets were easy enough to find. Inside the house, Penfold and Cook had already collected the rounds that had splintered the window frame—7.62 x 39 ammunition. They examined the inside of a tool shed in the backyard. Bingo. Someone had definitely been inside, and very recently, for an extended period. Items had been moved around, space made. Whoever was here had made himself at home, prepared. Eaten some food. They found earmuffs, the type worn by shooters at gun clubs. They collected the black ski mask from the driveway. A key piece of evidence, perhaps, there might be hairs on it.
Back at the station, Penfold walked through the main doors, past the desk, and turned left into the ident department. Then a quick right, into the storage section, his shoes clicking on the grayblue concrete floor, to the biohazard locker and the glass-doored cabinet for blood samples and other materials that would need drying out. Penfold stored the bullets, and the ski mask. He closed the door, signed in the check-in time and his case ident number, locked the door, wrote his report and went home in the early dawn. A few hours’ sleep, and then back to Sulphur Springs Road.
The search of the Short property intensified the morning after the shooting, Saturday, and lasted all day. Ten auxiliary officers were brought in to comb the outer perimeter, six for the inner perimeter. The day had dawned sunny and clear. The snow hadn’t materialized in the night, perhaps a good omen for the case. But the temperature had dropped and snow was still forecast. Inside the house, Detectives Mike Campbell, Frank Harild and Peter Abi-Rashed gathered, standing in a circle around the island in the kitchen, bouncing theories off each other.
The house bordered the Dundas Valley Conservation Area. AbiRashed wondered about a stray shot—poachers, perhaps, shooting at deer. But it could have been anything. A malicious, random act of violence in which Hugh Short happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time? You start big, then you eliminate, eliminate. Don’t pursue one path and use all your resources only to hit a dead end.
Campbell knew all that. But his instincts told him there was only one possibility. It sliced through all the other noise. Deer? No.
“If it was stray shots from a hunter, the guy’s misfires were awfully consistent,” he said. “It’s abortion. I’m sure of it.”