Determination of mercury in AAS
Mercury is an element with poor sensitivity when analyzed by traditional flame atomic absorption. This happens because the element is extremely volatile (remember mercury is a liquid at room temperatures and has significant vapor pressure at room temperature). Cold vapor is a widely used method, that's EPA approved, and shows a significant increase in sensitivity (nearly four fold). 
Source

There's many different devices out there that can be used to do elemental analysis, but from a personal experience, if you're working with dry solid material (ex. soil), then X-ray fluorescence (XRF) could be worth looking at. It's relatively cheap and does multi-element analysis. With mercury however, you're looking at a LOD of about 5 ppm, which is... okay. It depends on your experiment.