A few days earlier Ijemaru had been working late and was trusted with closing up the office. When you work for a newspaper it's a big deal to be given such a task. People are often trying to sneak into newspaper offices because of it's computers and records. They had almost as much access to things as the police, and if you had the right pass codes, you could get more info than the FBI. Ijemaru was double checking that the 'tips' box was locked when he found it wasn't. Somehow, and odd journal had ended up inside. That wasn't necessarily strange, what was strange was that there was nothing written in it. For some reason Ijemaru felt compelled to take it with him. So he put the journal in his bag and locked the 'tips' box.

When Ijemaru got home he noticed the journal was titled 'plague', and that there actually was some writing on the inside of the front cover. "All humans whose names are written in this Death Note shall die," he read. Ijemaru read through the instructions, but the one that really caught his interest was this: "If the cause of death is not specified, the human will die of a heart attack in 40 seconds." A heart attack! That was how Kira killed his victims.

Kira, that was the name of the mystical cereal killer who'd emerged in Japan a few years back. He'd had the ability to kill anyone—without even being there. Kira had since vanished and life had gone back to normal; a very boring normal in Ijemaru's opinion. Somehow, he knew that this book was how Kira had claimed his victims.

"Finally," said Ijemaru, "Things will start getting interesting around here!" Shortly after, he noticed that there was writing on the back cover too: "This is the only death note that kills with the plague if the cause of death is not specified. Only the human whose name is written in this Death Note shall be infected."

"Well," said Ijemaru, "I guess I'll be following a slightly different path than Kira. Let's see if this thing is real."

For the next three days Ijemaru began killing people in the US with the plague. He new it was working because every death got addressed in their newspaper. Even though they were in Japan and the outbreaks were in America, an uprising of the plague was big news. It took only 40 seconds for the person to die, but at that moment the symptoms of plague would catch up with them as if they'd had it for weeks. It was the best entertainment Ijemaru had had in ages.

Then, four days after Ijemaru found his Death Note, he met the Shinigami whom it belonged to.