Tactics

Having pinned down which man is the FBI agent, Light lets a week slip by before settling on Raye Penber's death. Penber lets slip that he is on assignment and accepts Light's vow to keep their encounter quiet, then heads back to his fiancee, satisfied that this student is no Kira. On the 27th of December, with Ryuk alongside, Light enters a packed underground mall, steps up behind the agent, names himself Kira, and kills a nearby criminal to prove the claim.

Cowed into obeying, Penber takes an envelope and boards the train he is sent to, where he is forced to set down the names of every other FBI operative working in Japan onto a single sheet of the notebook. The instant he steps onto the platform, a heart attack drops him. With a dozen agents gone, the NPA starts to mistrust L, while Penber's fiancee, herself a former Bureau agent, quietly begins her own hunt for Kira, already tracing a line back to the bus hijacking. The American president then pulls the FBI from the case, most of the Japanese officers walk away as well, and only five investigators remain alongside L and Watari.

Citing his faith in the handful who stayed, L invites the group to his hotel to meet him in person, even as Light frets that he has slipped up somewhere and L turns over the results of the prison trials. When the police chief, Light's father Soichiro, tells the household that he now leads the Kira case, Light gushes with pride and pledges to bring the killer down should his father fall. That night the chief and his men arrive at L's room to face the detective directly. The episode reached Japanese viewers on October 31, 2006, and English ones on November 18, 2007.