Kira tapes

Misa's recordings display the word Kira in an ornate blackletter style against a blank backdrop, echoing the typeface L favors on screen, with the speaker's voice run through a distorter. The investigation later answers with a tape of its own, presenting the name in a flowing computer-rendered script ringed by a glow so that audiences read it as a genuine Kira disowning the imposter. Across the sequence the messages move from threats and ultimatums to pleas for a meeting, while a written diary smuggles in coded hints about where the two Kiras might find each other.

Sakura TV receives the first four tapes in April 2004, each supposedly from Kira, threatening station head Hitoshi Demegawa, who airs them for the ratings. They forecast the deaths of petty crooks and of two anti-Kira newscasters, lay out demands that criminals' details be published, and finally insist that either the police chief or L be executed and that L show his face on television. Police attempts to halt the broadcast cost detective Hirokazu Ukita and two officers their lives, and the crude footage convinces L that a second, eye-wielding Kira is also at work. Light, newly attached to the Task Force, frets that slaughtering innocents is bleeding away the public goodwill his cause depends on.

At L's request Light secretly scripts the police's reply, a fifth tape in which Kira forgives the imitator yet condemns the killing of innocents. The second Kira answers in turn, owning up to being a separate Kira, asking to meet, and alluding to the gods of death, which leaves L stunned and the other detectives convinced it must be code. A follow-up diary, written as the mundane May journal of a student, points to a rendezvous at Aoyama on the twenty-second, where Misa first lays eyes on Light. Misa eventually visits him directly, proves herself the second Kira by having him touch her notebook to reveal Rem, and explains that a friend helped produce the videos, leaving fingerprints on the envelopes. She is arrested soon after, the case built from pollen traced to her hometown, a pen and notebook that fit the diary, and train receipts logging her trips to mail the tapes.