With the Riptide Detective Agency in it's worse ever financial trouble, much to Nick's disagreement, Cody is considering an offer to sell the agency to corporate investigation company Tricor, who want to buy them out. After the Riptide is ransacked, adding further to the P.I.s problems, Murray and Cody accept jobs with Tricor, but Nick refuses, and opts instead to leave the agency. But when a friend of the trio, who had been working as a security guard on Pier 56, is murdered, it slowly begins to seem that Tricor is somehow involved, and the Riptide agency's recent financial troubles have been orchestrated by the same company, who are determined to get their hands of a letter left by the dead man to the trio before his death. The key to the whole mystery seems to lie on the unobtainable 13th floor of Tricor, where a secret super-computer is based – and the detectives intend to unlock the secrets held on that floor...