Senchyshak, who stood six feet and weighed nearly 200 pounds, felt the even weight of the Glock hanging at his hip. It had been just a few months since cops had switched from the .38 revolvers to the automatic Glocks, after a couple of shootouts in Ontario where the criminals had the upper hand in firepower. He stood on the front step of the large home. Could be a domestic, he reflected. Husband could have a gun, waiting to blow a hole in the next person to come inside. He knocked on the door, his senses on high alert. A woman answered the door. It was Katherine Short. A male voice yelling frantically from upstairs.
“Help! Help!”
Katherine rushed up the stairs and Senchyshak followed cautiously behind. He knew nothing about the Shorts, didn’t know who else was in the house, who had taken a shot, and he had no backup. He made quick mental notes of the layout on the main floor as he climbed, planning an escape route in case he needed one. He spoke quietly into his radio again, offering a live play-by-play of the consequences of his decision. “Three-eleven going upstairs.” He entered the den and saw Katherine’s husband on the floor, his clothes soaked with blood. He was alive.
“Three-eleven. Three-eleven with the victim. Victim conscious. Arm wound. Bleeding. Tell the ambulance to step on it.”
The bullet had blown through Dr. Hugh Short’s elbow. The doctor and his wife were hysterical now, yelling. Not in pain so much as fear, terror. Short would have felt unworldly pain when the shot hit but then the adrenaline blasted through his system, shock, fear—survival. Stop the bleeding. Stop it, or you’re dead in minutes. Wrap the wound, wrap it now, or bleed out. He had one belt tied in a tourniquet just above the wound on the right elbow, and he was trying, with help from his wife, to wrap a second belt. His eyes met Senchyshak’s. “I’m a doctor.”
The cop put his hands into the fray, helping tighten the second belt, soaking his bare hands in blood. “What happened?” asked Senchyshak, trying to get more information, mindful that the shooter could be somewhere near.
“Two shots through the window,” replied Short. “Heard the first. Hit by the second.”
The paramedics arrived, several police cars, the dark street now ablaze with flashing lights. Short continued giving directions, the combination of his survival and healing instincts in overdrive. “OK, doctor,” said the paramedic. “Just let us do what we do.”
Senchyshak rode with Short in the ambulance to Hamilton General Hospital. As his shift came to an end at dawn, he kept going over it in his head, replaying the possibilities. Where had the shooter gone? Back into the woods? Probably not. Driven right past Senchyshak the other way on Sulphur Springs? Unlikely. Shots fired at about 9:25 p.m. Arrival at scene at 9:37 p.m. The sniper would have already hit the road before police arrived, would have his escape planned in advance. A getaway car? And why shoot Dr. Short? So many questions. But the detectives had the case now. In a bathroom, Mike Senchyshak scrubbed his hands. Hugh Short’s dried blood turned to liquid and flowed down the drain.
Chapter 2 ~ Atomic Dog
Jim Kopp heard the news. He read voraciously, made a point of knowing everything that was happening in the abortion wars, was always connecting the dots. The Canadian doctor had been severely wounded, his elbow smashed to a pulp, but he was going to live. And Dr. Hugh Short might never be able to practise medicine again. Kopp enjoyed reflecting upon moral considerations in the abortion war, debating them. By wounding the doctor, the shooter had prevented the doctor from aborting fetuses for some time. Thus the doctor could no longer violate the physician’s oath to do no harm.
The Hippocratic Oath? Yes, it was true, the Hippocratic Oath actually mentioned abortion. True. You didn’t hear much about it, the oath was revised over the years. But the original version said that a physician shall not “give a woman a pessary to procure abortion.” Harm? A bullet to the elbow is painful indeed, a nasty piece of business, but what of the unborn child, thought Jim, what of the child no bigger than a field mouse, helpless when facing the suction equipment, the equivalent of being tossed into the inside of a jet engine? You want to talk about a victim? Harm! He saw in his mind’s eye the baby in the safety of the uterus fighting off the forceps gripping its leg, feel the abortionist grab the femur and twist it, snap it off like a turkey leg, and yes, even still, he fights back, tries to get away, but doesn’t stand a chance.
Oh yes, no doubt there would be much hand-wringing over the shooting of the doctor. But Jim Kopp, for one, felt there were already people being hurt in the war—preborn babies. In the blink of an eye as God measures time everyone will be called to task—what did we do when the world feasted on the blood of our children?
Ancaster, Ontario
November 11, 1995
The morning after, the air cold and dry, sunshine peeking through thick layers of cloud. The detective walked up the stairs of the house. Mike Campbell entered a room filled with light and looked at the chair where Dr. Hugh Short had been sitting. Campbell was a plainclothes detective with the Major Crimes division of Hamilton police. He had sandy blond hair, friendly eyes, and spoke with a classic just-the-facts-ma’am cop inflection. And he was a Roman Catholic. Considered himself pro-life.
He moved closer to the window. Outside, the forensic detectives were gathering evidence. The shooting had clearly been well planned, the home cased out, the Shorts’ schedule monitored in advance. He had planned his escape. Detectives are trained to keep an open mind, even when most clues point to one motive. But Campbell had a feeling. He saw the splinters on the floor. The two rounds had not punctured the window glass, but rather the wooden frame. He noted the two holes were close together. It all spoke to him. Planning. Intent. Accuracy. Abortion.
Campbell’s father was the late Jimmy Campbell, one of Hamilton’s legendary old school detectives. Crime in Hamilton was not as colorful as it once was, or as it was remembered. Steeltown’s past was filled with the stuff of movies, gangsters with tommy guns, tough cops manning the thin blue line against organized crime, the force’s “morality squad” sweeping the streets clean. Godfathers like the infamous Johnny (Pops) Papalia, bombs in bakeries, paid hits, blood justice meted out in alleyways with two-by-fours, and underworld kingpins, some believed, encased in concrete at the bottom of murky Hamilton Harbor, granted for eternity an up-close view of freighters coming into port loaded with iron ore.
The nature of the crimes, focused as they were on money, liquor, drugs, sex and power, was not difficult to comprehend. Black and white, good guys and bad guys. But the maiming of Hugh Short by a rifle one dark night in a wealthy suburb was a first, opening up a world of gray, streaked with blood.
Back in the old days, when Jimmy Campbell worked the streets, a detective assigned to a violent crime might have jumped in the car, headed for a run-down bar, trolled the ranks of the disenfranchised, shone a light into dark corners and watched where the roaches scurried. His son hit the modern, high-tech version of that bar. He surfed the Internet, in 1995 a relatively new tool for investigators. Campbell typed key words into a search engine, words like “abortion,” “violence,” “radical.” The home page of the Army of God appeared on Mike Campbell’s screen. It was a hardcore anti-abortion group in the United States, of unknown strength and numbers.
Blood flowing, photos of aborted fetuses, limbs severed, torn reddish-brown flesh, photos that were pornographic in their stark presentation. A related website called The Nuremberg Files listed doctors providing abortion services in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom. Some of the names had strokes through them. Well, Campbell thought, I’m getting the flavor of the movement. Clearly there were people in cyberspace for whom the abortion war was literal. But who were they, where were they, and what were their names? Would one of them bring the war to a suburb of Hamilton? And why?