“I was born in December of 1968,” Lincoln begins, “in Charity Hospital in Chicago. When I first went to school, our family went by the last name of Taney. But I know now that was just an alias.”

“And how do you know that?”

“Daddy had a lot of jobs over the years, but the truth is, he was a con man. A grifter. Because of that, he always went by different names. Aliases. That goes with that kind of work.”

“Where is Junius Jelks now, Lincoln?”

“The Illinois State Penitentiary at Joliet, serving a fifteen-year sentence for fraud.”

“Go on.”

“When I was six years old, Mama moved me to a different school. She told me then that our last name was going to be Turner from then on. She said that had been our real name all along. Which was true, in a way. It turns out that Turner was the name on my birth certificate.”

“Can you explain that?”

“At the time I was conceived—probably March of 1968—Mama’s first husband, James Turner, had been dead for nine months. Killed in Vietnam. When Mama went to Chicago, she was pregnant by Dr. Cage. But when I was born, she put down James Turner’s name on the birth certificate. She told them her husband was still over in Vietnam. They didn’t have computers back then, so I guess that wasn’t hard. Anyway, a year later, when Mama married Daddy—Mr. Jelks—she believed he was an insurance man. But by the time I was five, she’d figured out different. Junius Jelks made his living breaking the law. Mama almost left him then, but she really wanted me to have a father, so she made a deal with him. If Mr. Jelks would legally adopt me, she would stay his wife.”

Lincoln’s Dickensian narrative has everyone in the room enthralled. Looking behind me, at the balcony, I see Serenity writing in her notebook, her rapt eyes on the witness box.

“Mr. Jelks agreed to this arrangement,” Lincoln goes on, “but they still had a problem. Daddy didn’t have a good enough ID to adopt me under the name of Taney, and he was wanted for several crimes under his legal name, Jelks. Then he hit on the idea of using Mama’s first husband’s ID papers to adopt me. It’s kind of sad to say it out loud, but Mama agreed to the plan, and that’s what they did. Junius Jelks became James Turner, Vietnam vet and war hero, and I went from being Lincoln Taney to Lincoln Turner.”

Shad pauses to let this sad and complex tale sink into the minds of the jury.

“How long did Junius Jelks succeed in passing himself off as James Turner?”

“Several years. He went by James Turner when he did anything legitimate, but he had a lot of other aliases for criminal activities.”

“How do you know that?”