Murder With A Chaser (Microbrewery Mysteries Book 2) by Belle Knudson Page A

Maisie's living room. This person was thinner, paler, and looked like he was about to keel over at any moment.
                  "Mr. Ward?" I said, trying not to sound too concerned.
                  He spoke with a terrible rasp. "The key..." he started to say, and then quickly stumbled over to my office couch and fell into it. I bent down to his level. He managed to turn himself around. He was breathing heavily, gasping for air. "The key..." he said again, "is in the carp."
                  And then, no more breathing.
    #
                  Pardon the gallows humor, but dead bodies aren’t good for business.
                  This was the second time now that a dead body had made its way into the day-to-day operations of my brewery, and I was getting a little tired of it.
                  "Are you ok?" said Lester Moore.
                  "I'm fine."
                  "Are you sure?"
                  "I said I'm fine, Detective."
                  "You can call me Lester in front of these guys. It’s ok."
                  His team was just finishing up. The coroner had already removed the body.             
                  "He thinks it's some kind of poison," Lester said. "There was a sharp smell about his mouth."
                  "I didn’t get close enough to him for CPR. I just froze. It was so sudden."
                  I told him I was more than a little ashamed of myself for freezing on the spot.
                  "You couldn’t have done anything to save him, Madison. The coroner said he was pretty sure death was sudden and unstoppable."
                  "Pretty sure isn’t good enough."
                  "I'll get the report to you as soon as possible. In the meantime, why don’t you take the day off?"
                  "You wouldn’t believe the amount of work I have to do."
                  It was true. The stack of papers I was in the middle of would only multiply now.
                  "That's ridiculous," Lester said. His face changed. "Listen, this is awkward, but I'm going to need to take your statement."
                  I sighed and rolled my eyes.
                  "It won’t take long."
                  He listened quietly and wrote as I told him everything that happened from the moment I got the phone call to the moment I called 911. Lester stopped me only to ask clarification on one or two points, and other than that, was totally silent. Until I got to Daniel Ward's last words.
                  "Carp? As in fish?"
                  "The key is in the carp."
                  His face screwed up in confusion. "What key? What carp?"
                  "I have no idea."
                  "Huh."
                  "Exactly."
                  "And that means nothing to you."
                  "Nope."
                  "Was he hiding anything?"
                  "How should I know?"
                  "Was he... hmm... did you have any idea why he came up to see you?"
                  "None whatsoever."
                  "And where do you know him from again?"
                  I sighed impatiently and rehashed the story of Maisie Ward and her Uncle Shawn.
                  "Ah, right," Lester said in deep thought. "Interesting." He awoke from his reverie and said, "Well, listen, you're ok, but I want you to take the rest of the day off. Paperwork can always wait. Ok? I'll call you later?"
                  He put a tender hand on my shoulder, and I gave him a smile that I wasn't really feeling.
                 

Chapter 7
                  Taking the day off would have