Dawn at the Mayfair Diner. The amber glow of streetlights mixed with the violent red flash of police cruisers begins to fade with the rising of a furnace orange sun. Detective Daphne Marlow exits the diner holding a steaming cup of hot joe in one hand and a summary of the crime scene evidence in the other. Taking a seat on the bumper of her tan LTD, Detective Marlow begins to review the evidence.

At 5:30 a.m. the body of one Joe D. Wood was found in the walk in refrigerator in the diner's basement. At 6:00 a.m. the coroner arrived and determined that the core body temperature of the corpse was degrees Fahrenheit. Thirty minutes later the coroner again measured the core body temperature. This time the reading was degrees Fahrenheit. The thermostat inside the refrigerator reads degrees Fahrenheit.

Daphne takes out a fading yellow legal pad and ketchup-stained calculator from the front seat of her cruiser and begins to compute. She knows that Newton's Law of Cooling says that the rate at which an object cools is proportional to the difference between the temperature of the body at time and the temperature of the environment surrounding the body. She jots down the equation