Malice

As January wears on, Mello shadows Kiyomi Takada while Mikami keeps filling pages and Gevanni reports progress to Near. A coded phone exchange between Takada and Mikami confirms that Light is cleared to meet his rival face to face. Near, finding nothing amiss in Mikami's routine, formally requests the encounter, reasoning that exposing himself in person will finally close the case.

Near sets strict terms: the full task force and his own agents present, Misa kept away, the notebook brought along but held by someone other than Light, and the meeting fixed for the twenty-eighth of January at an abandoned warehouse he calls the Yellow Box. Both men privately vow to win. Over dinner Light hands Takada a final instruction, to kill Near once the chance arrives.

Outside a red-carpet event, Matt blankets the crowd in smoke while Mello whisks Takada away by motorbike and shackles her in a hidden trailer. Matt is run down by her guards and shot dead, and Mello orders her to strip at gunpoint, unaware she has palmed a fragment of the notebook beneath the blanket he allows her. As he drives off, she writes his true name, Mihael Keehl, and he dies as the truck rolls to a stop.

Freed and alone, Takada phones Light to beg for rescue, and he instead instructs her to keep killing before setting out with Aizawa and Ide. From the back seat he produces the scrap hidden in his watch, writes her name, and compels her to set the building, her own body, Mello's corpse, and every remaining page ablaze. Light and Lidner reach the site only to face the inferno. Mello's true name had come to Light through Soichiro's dying use of the shinigami eyes.