To Catch a Killer

"What happened to Imtiaz?" Valencia remembers begging, first to one person, then another. "Who killed him? Why?"

Wakili waits in the car. Valencia asks somebody she thinks was Imtiaz's friend. "Tell me what happened . . . Please, Imtiaz is dead," she screams. The man looks away like he is ashamed.

"Imtiaz was my man," she remembers him saying.

Valencia screams: "Somebody knows. Somebody knows."

But if anybody does, nobody says.

Wakili drives Valencia back to her apartment building in Northwest Washington. She moved to the two-bedroom flat near Walter Reed Army Medical Center after Said was slain in 1999. She was by then a single mother to five remaining children, and she superstitiously believed no more would be murdered if she lived in a building where people had to be buzzed in.

She takes a seat in the dining room that she has converted into her office space, turns on her computer and in rapid fire sends

e-mails to all D.C. Council members and the mayor's office. Her son has just been killed, she tells them. Then she picks up the phone. Of course at this time of night, nearly 11 o'clock, no one answers. She leaves messages anyway: This is Valencia Mohammed, former school board member, now reporter for the Afro American and an editor of News Dimensions. My son has just been killed. I want to make sure you have people on the case to solve his murder.

I was real quiet about Said, but I'm not letting this go, she remembers telling them. Imtiaz is dead. I'm going to be the activist I am.

The next day, D.C. police detectives Dan Lewis and Sean Caine come by. Lewis is short, and Caine is tall, a man with a shaved head and a big presence. They sit in the living room, and the detectives pull out about three pages of names, Valencia remembers.

"We got your son's cellphone," Lewis says.

Then he fires off dozens of nicknames they found on the cellphone. "Do you know Boo? Do you know Dug Out? Do you know Dis? . . ."