Unraveling

To mend the rift with the police, L gathers the detectives still willing to chase Kira for a closed-door session meant to stay hidden until the case is won. The man who greets them proves unkempt, surprisingly youthful, and oddly dry in manner. He scolds them for flashing their ID cards, noting that a Kira in his seat could have struck them dead, then has them silence their phones and take no written notes, asking instead to be called Ryuzaki.

Sipping coffee loaded with sugar, L moves through the evidence. When others propose keeping criminals' names out of the press so Kira cannot reach them, he pushes back, citing a juvenile streak in Kira that mirrors his own, and urges instead that the media be used to overstate the team's numbers. With unnerving precision he narrows down whom the agents had been shadowing, fixing on December 19 inside the span from the fourteenth to the twenty-seventh. He grants that the upper hand is lost for now because his face is known, yet promises to triumph in the end, closing the session by questioning each detective alone to clear them.

Realizing his December 19 misstep, Light seizes on an errand, dropping clothes at police headquarters where his father cannot be reached by phone. There he catches Penber's fiancee mid-effort, trying to bring the Task Force what she has dug up on Kira, and offers to relay it on her behalf. The two step out together to talk, and Light, sure his destiny is to remake the world through the notebook, feels both elated and rattled at standing before the one person who could undo him. As she gives her name, Shoko Maki, Ryuk laughs; she has pieced together that the bus hijacker answered to Kira, and Light, alarmed that she now grasps Kira can take lives by means apart from a heart attack, reaches for the page already tucked in his pocket. The installment first aired in Japan on November 7, 2006.