Even now, as Philippe chased traffic down the highway, aiming the Commander towards the peaks of Philadelphia's buildings, he ran through the briefing in his head. As always, he had been called at an ungodly early hour at his home phone, his superiors not bothering with the fact that he had a small child who needed to sleep much, much more than he did. So he had awoken to little Kenneth's screaming and the phone ringing off its hook in the kitchen. Philippe sighed--it was already turning into one of Those Days. 'Those Days' (capital T, capital D) being the days when he was going to wake up angry and run the rest of the day that way.
Philippe had a lot of Those Days.
The next several frantic minutes were spent first responding to his superiors' phone call, and then finally managing to calm Kenneth, change his diaper and get him some warm milk and put back down to bed. Kenneth, perhaps understanding the urgency of the situation, gazed at Philippe a while with those knowing little iron-grey eyes of his, and then nodded off into a deep slumber. Philippe watched the little one for a while, a frown scarring his features as his thoughts circled around the child briefly before he managed to return to his room and pull himself into his daily wear. He didn't bother with a suit; it was too early and the act of tying a tie always turned into an angry bout of yelling at nothing, and this early in the morning, with the baby fresh back to sleep, it wasn't a good idea to be breaking anything. After all, he was trying to be better for the kid, wasn't he? It would be what Lauren wanted, wouldn't it?
So Philippe was out the door by way too early in the morning once again, heading from Philadelphia to Arlington and then to Washington, where he sat in on his briefing. As he had speculated from talk around the office, it all had to do, once again, with the paranormal activity in the area. Deladrier and one of the other agents in the Bureau, some girl Haydon, were being assigned to study and investigate the phenomenon in an attempt to curtail its spreading out of Philadelphia, "In the interest of National Security". Philippe had chuckled inwardly at that--no doubt that someone down the line thought this had something to do with that Khrushchev fellow in the USSR and all of this fear of the ever-present Communist boogeyman.
So here he was, flying back down the freeway into Philadelphia in the middle of the day, hoping that he wouldn't catch mid-town traffic on the way.
Five minutes later, he was stuck in mid-day traffic, and his frustration grew by the second. Every inch felt like it was preceded by an hour of immobility, and he didn't know what the cause of it was, but for some reason, some unfathomable reason, if he craned his neck, he could see traffic moving swiftly to either side of his lane and just a little further up. This news frustrated Philippe infinitely more, and by the time they had made five blocks he was red in the face and could feel his blood pressure roaring up like a tsunami of hatred. A car shifted to his left, leaving a brief opening into the fast lane, and so Philippe took it--cutting off a line of traffic almost a mile long in the process on the way through. As he picked up speed, weaving dangerously through traffic, he roared past the front of the block, not even registering the long Hearse bearing the "Jones and Jones" logo losing a left-hand mirror as he shrieked past, screaming every obscenity he could think of as he sped off towards SOB headquarters.
Moments later, he hauled his Studebaker to a stop outside of SOB headquarters and stormed in, for all intents and purposes looking something like a large boulder, holding a thin manila folder--his briefing--under his right arm. He looked at the others around the office floor quickly, making sure they all knew his mood before he made his way over to his desk and immediately set about reading up on the case files they had available.