Abduction

The story opens in 2007, when Roger Ruvie tells the orphans Near and Mello that L has died without naming a single successor and asks them to join forces. Mello refuses, unwilling to share the work with Near, and leaves to chase the case his own way. Five years on, Near briefs the American president and the FBI on how the notebooks operate, lays out that two of them exist, one with Kira and one held by Japan's police, and is handed leadership of a new CIA and FBI unit called the SPK.

Back in Tokyo, an ordinary evening at the Yagami home, where a grown Sayu teases a flustered Matsuda, is cut short when word arrives that police chief Takimura has been seized. The investigators gather and learn the kidnappers are demanding the very notebook the Japanese force secretly holds, a fact almost no one outside their circle should know.

Mello, now running with a Mafia crew, is behind the abduction and intends to claim both notebooks to get ahead of Near. Light, unaware of the bigger picture, kills Takimura with the Death Note to keep it out of criminal hands, only to realize too late that the move exposes a leak inside the police and endangers the investigators' families. The kidnappers promptly shift their target, grabbing Sayu Yagami and ordering Soichiro to deliver the notebook to Los Angeles within two days. After a photograph confirms his daughter is alive, Soichiro insists, as the ranking officer and her father, on carrying the notebook himself.

Near, meanwhile, traces the killing to Kira's reach inside the force and pins the kidnapping on Mello. The episode closes when Light, posing as L on a call to the FBI, is rattled to hear Near greet him as merely the second L and announce that the SPK now exists, leaving Light shaken by how closely this N echoes the original detective.

The chapter marks the twenty-seventh episode and a major reset, ushering in Near, Mello, and the SPK as the new pieces in the Kira game. A running joke threads through the names: the FBI man introduces himself as John McEnroe before admitting it is fake, and his real identity, Larry Connors, surfaces on a screen misspelled as Rally Connors. Both nods point to the tennis rivalry of John McEnroe and Jimmy Connors, with rally doubling as a tennis term. The Japanese airing was on April 17, 2007, ahead of the English broadcast on April 27, 2008.